When her mother is killed in a riding accident, nine-year-old Amy is left mute and traumatised. She was there - but she cannot remember what happened and she is haunted by a nightmare that she cannot fully explain. Gradually her voice returns, but not her memory. Her relationship with her father deepens as she grows older, and she resigns herself to living with the blanks. As long as she has her dad, she can cope with anything. Then six years later, as Amy turns sixteen and a new woman enters her father's life, the chance discovery of a hidden postcard gives her the vital clue she needs to uncover the truth about the past. It takes her to Italy, to a man she has never met. Was he her mother's lover - or her killer? The threads of the past lead inexorably back to the present and, as they gradually allow her to remember those horrific moments she thought forever buried, finally - and in more ways than one - Amy comes of age.

From Kirkus Reviews Reading a Rubens novel (Mate in Three, Our Father, Sat on Edge--all 1987) requires an iron-nerved distance. Her cool tales about acrid domestic relations and solitary masturbatory griefs, rages, and obsessions, touched as they are with a bizarre comic irony, cut deep. Here, a London psychiatrist, cold as an arctic bean, germinates an evil seed. Dr. Alistair Crown's wife, Virginia, has just given birth to their first child, named ``Doris'' by an angry Virginia from a card she found in the flowers Alistair brought her--flowers purloined from a cemetery. Alistair is cheap as well as rotten. Doris is born with Down's syndrome, and Alistair will never look at the child's face. But he will touch her body (after covering her face) with what he considers one version of parental love, and then, obsessed, he will draw doodles of an imagined Doris face. Inevitably, Alistair and Virginia separate, and he continues to see patients. (Rubens wickedly skewers the workday of a bored psychiatrist). Into Alistair's office one day comes ``Esau,'' a huge man covered with hair like an animal. Rejected by his father, Esau strips before medical men to reverse his father's withering verdict, and Esau becomes Alistair's gentle friend (platonic). Esau's tragic end preludes another erasure of innocence when little five-year-old Doris is kidnapped. The anguish of temporarily reunited parents and grandparents as hours and days tick by has acid calms and tempests of unrelieved nightmare. The close is predictable, but such is Rubens's skill that the reader must plunge along to the end of a very direful road indeed. A teeth-grinding, chilling tale of human nastiness--in guises that are both horrible and most commonplace. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description Dr. Alistair Crown is disappointed when his wife gives birth to a daughter, but when he learns that she has Down syndrome, he rejects the child