* In spite of the echoes of Rosemary's Baby (a building with an infamous history) and The Boys From Brazil (in his climax), Sliver lives up to neither of these earlier novels, mostly because it isn't as grand as the others, there's no big prize dangling at the end for the bad guy. He's got what he wants; it's just a matter of keeping it. Since our heroine isn't too thrilled with that idea, the whole thing degenerates into a routine thriller that ends with one of those implausibilities that you have to figure must have been born of some news story Levin once read. The alternative is that Levin simply made it up in order to dish out his own brand of Greek fatalism. I know that's all rather vague, but I don't want to spoil anything. In any case, I didn't buy it for a second.

* None of which is to say that the book isn't suspenseful. The book is about a guy who watches the tenants of a tall apartment building using hidden cameras. We learn this on Page 1. Not having anything else up his sleeve, Levin realizes he's got to make that interesting in itself. And he does. Not the way Woolrich (or Hitchcock) did in Rear Window, though. No, he puts that idea in reverse. Instead of a voyeur who witnesses a murder, we get a woman who, after being watched, discovers the voyeur himself is a murderer. Levin then gives the idea another twist, and we're off to the races. It's all very well done. It's just that Levin really has nowhere to go with it, except toward that silly climax.