For him read Matt Hinson, burly beefcake builder and handy-man who opens this novel brutally butchering ex-Governor Harry Radcliffe and his wife in their snow-bound Californian home. For her, Julia Larsen, author, TV reporter and daughter to the deceased. Her discovery of the carnage fair ruins Christmas. Marriage to BMW-driving Tom is shaky and long unresolved feelings for Hinson still smoulder, so when he is arrested, Julia just knows he must be innocent.

If Joe Eszterhas hadn't flogged this particular dead horse to market and back again so many times himself he might have cause to reach for his lawyers. Racina's novel is textbook dreadful.

As readers we wonder (hell, hope) for a moment that Snow Angel is looking to be something different. We follow Hinson's bloodbath and appreciate his guilt from the off. We grab for something other than witless cod Hitchcock from this (long) 292 page pot-boiler as Racina's set-up allows for something wilfully perverse - for Julia to see the blood on hunky Hinson's hands and still tumble in to his bed - but it is not to be.

Instead, this former General Hospital scribe looks for psychological depth in Julia's crudely realised mastectomy, and works hard to have us believe that even America could be in thrall to Hinson's First Grade poetical musings: "Lingering doubts, shadows of moments/Long tucked into the winter past/When dreams freeze over like/The lake at the top of the world."

Snow Angel is lumbering, soapy, vaguely tasteless woman-in-peril crud, and if you can't guess the rest after the first half-dozen pages then you're obviously reading the wrong magazine.

"I hate paperbacks," says Hinson at one point. "A real book has to have cloth on it. It'll last. Gives it immortality." By their own words shall you know them. Watch Jagged Edge instead.