They are a content, well-to-do married couple with a twelve-year-old daughter until the day Pandora Hammond is causally picked-up in a hotel dining room for a brief but energetic couple of hours with a mystery man.

Far away in Arizona, movie production designer Alec Hammond is himself engaged in an equally vigorous fling with a young stunt woman who will all too soon die in a tragic on-set accident.

The two seemingly unconnected events are both, however, presided over by the inscrutable and domineering stunt arranger Charles Wildman. He and his constant female companion pick up woman as pawns for their bizarre sexual games, no strings attached. But Pandora obsesses Wildman like no one before and his determination to possess sucks the principals into a vortex of sensuality and violence from which none will escape.

Theoretically.

Paul Mayersberg's place in film history is assured, penning scripts for two of the brilliant British director Nic Roeg's most elaborate and dazzling works, The Man Who Fell To Earth and the little-seen Eureka. His own career behind the camera is somewhat less auspicious (Nightfall or Captive, anyone?) and he eventually turned novelist in 1991 with an unfulfilled but flamboyantly tangled psycho-sexual thriller, Homme Fatale. There, as here, sex seems to be the prime motivating factor.

Lots of it.

Violent Silence is one of those novels flawed in almost every department you might care to mention. At heart it lacks any semblance of characterisation, sympathetic or otherwise. The Hammonds' privileged, money-to-burn lifestyle, ghastly whining and drab daughter fail spectacularly to illicit compassion, Wildman's ludicrous sexual adventurer convinces not a jot, and the whole is driven by some of the least attractive sexual endeavours this side of a 'gentlemen's' magazine. So all encompassing are the acts described that within no time at all Mayersberg is struggling for words. The results are some of the least erotic and frankly ugly sex scenes ever committed to the page in the name of literature. His obsession with the bowel reaches a new level in the unwelcome.

Structurally, he attempts to induce a notion of Roeg-ish filmic framework to the piece, leaping from third- to first-person with little warning, from conventional - frequently overwritten - narrative to odd passages rendered as pages of script. While all this is less distracting than it might first appear, it adds nothing and swiftly becomes little more than shabby affectation.

In its favour, Violent Silence is a fast read, even if that is as nothing compared to the speed with which it fades from memory. Let favourable comparisons to Basic Instinct on the cover be suitable warning.