Said infant son, Mark Simpson, is now a college freshman going to school on a full track and field ride at a midwest school that just happens(!) to be in the same town as the now-long-abandoned base where all this took place almost two decades before. By the end of the war, both husbands would be dead, one under mysterious circumstances (he was shipped out after being assured that would never happen he was the base chaplain), and the sole survivor of the foursome had fled to California with her infant son. After one climactic night, one of the wives would have disappeared.

There is a plot, though figuring out what it is before the final hundred pages is the kind of thing you should probably leave to those who drink a great deal more than you: there was a World War II-era love triangle just before Pearl Harbor. Because I can't conceive of any other way this book makes even the slightest semblance of sense. That would have probably saved me a month of spare free time being taken up by this travesty of a “horror” novel, about which I am going to entirely ignore the rules of space-time and claim that it is Harris' exploration of Tracey Walters' famous, and hilarious, “lattice of coincidence” speech from the 1983 film Repo Man. It should be a rule, and in fact, I'm making it one right now: the second time you have to stop and ask yourself why you're still reading this piece of claptrap, stop reading it. She has also been an author in residence at Oklahoma's Central State University. Harris's work has received a wide readership in 1983, nine million of her books were in print, and her work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Japanese. These works, in addition to those listed above, include In the Midst of Earth (1969), The Peppersalt Land (1970), The Runaway's Diary (1971), The Conjurers (1974), Bledding Sorrow (1976), The Portent (1980), The Last Great Love (1981), Warrick (1985), Night Games (1987), and Lost and Found (1991). After that Harris proved a prolific author, publishing seventeen books, including novels, short stories, romance/ historical fiction and children's fiction in a twenty-year period from 1970 to 1989. Harris's first collection of short stories, King's Ex, was published by Doubleday in 1967. Harris was educated in her home state, attending Cottey College from 1945 to 1951, then transferring to the University of Oklahoma, from which she received a bachelor of arts degree in 1953 and a master of arts degree in 1955.

Harris was born on June 4, 1931, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the daughter of John P., an oil executive, and Dora (nee Veal) Harris.

The Diviner by Marilyn Harris