Grace

Britisher Stewart has yet to match the tightly knit terrors of his first novel, Monkey Shines (1983). And now, as he did in Far Cry (1984) and Blindsight (1988), he guts a strong, even courageous, premise - a rural English girl attaining visions of the Virgin Mary - with dull, rough-edged technobabble. Stewart kicks off with a roar, though, as heroine Grace Holmwood, 17, begins seeing bright lights - and images of the Virgin Mary, smiling and offering a message of "Etemal peace and life everlasting." A miracle? After initial skepticism but then his own moment of mystical illumination, the village priest thinks so; but Leonard Grigson, Holmwood family doctor and suitor of Grace's widowed mom, sees Grace's visions as the result of migraines - or something more simster: a side-effect of exposure to a hidden radioactive dump in a nearby mine. When the girl suddenly manifests the even weirder symptom of virgin conception, the priest, convinced of her sanctity, defends her before a Vatican inquisitor who dismisses her claim in a brutal application of Realpolitik that does little other than reveal the author's anti-Rome biases and set up the gross scientific explanation: of course it's radioactivity that's at fault. But that's not all: what about the flashes that Grace begins to get from the point of view of her five-years-dead twin brother, lying on an operating table? And why are those flashes simultaneous with activity in the disem-bodied brain that Grigson's fanatical scientist colleague keeps in his lab? An extended, energetic finale that sees Grigson squelch the monster twin brain and save Grace's life ties it all rather sloppily together. What at first looks to be a vigorous tale of a modern miracle melts down, with some suspense but little style, into a mishmash of Donovan's Brain and a generic nuclear-waste cautionary tale. Positively graceless. (Kirkus Reviews)