Publisher's Weekly
Readers must prepare to be disturbed--and exasperated--by this X-rated, sinister and, above all, sado-masochistic tale. Sam Leo, a married epidemiologist, falls for a Mexican temptress named Selinde who has a proclivity for painful (though apparently compelling) sexual acts with jalapeno peppers. Unbeknownst to Sam, Selinde may be a supernatural being from Aztec folklore who demands human sacrifice; she's connected to an epidemic of rape-murders in which unresistant victims are stabbed repeatedly by their assailants. When Sam, his wife and two other couples take a vacation together at an isolated North Carolina beach house, it's clear that one or more of them will wind up on the sacrificial altar. Transfixed by a magical kaleidoscope that creates erotic mandalas, the group develops a taste for S & M. Watkins ( Dark Winds ) uses increasingly violent orgies to build suspense, culminating in a horrendous scene that finds several buck-naked survivors handling a razor-edged ritual knife. This gruesome tale may hold a certain fascination, but repetition makes the highly explicit sex scenes eventually seem ridiculous--a case of overkill, as it were.

Library Journal
Married epidemiologist Sam Leo is drawn into a highly charged affair with a mysterious young woman he meets at the site of a traffic fatality. Sam's nasty coworker, a computer hacker, discovers the affair and blackmails Sam into helping him predict the next in a series of sex murders as part of a computer game he has created. A pathologist-friend investigating one of the murders impulsively buys an expensive kaleidoscope, which causes a sudden intensity in the stagnating physical relationship with her husband. Watkins ( The Fire Within , Berkley, 1991) ties together these seemingly disparate events into a thrilling erotic novel that explores the hidden savagery in six ''normal'' people and the close bond between pain and ecstasy, love and death. This fascinating, frightening, and very readable account of a descent into an erotic hell portrays scenes of explicit sex and violence that, though never gratuitous, might offend squeamish readers. It merits a place in genre and contemporary fiction collections.-- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.