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An Image of Death, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95.

With her third book, Libby Fischer Hellmann seems to be really hitting her stride - she's smoothed out her narrative style, eliminating all but necessary plotting, and made this book the most emotionally moving of the three. The book starts with a horrifying "image of death" - we are with a woman as she waits, cold and hungry, in a strange room, for someone. We know the woman feels hopeful; but when the "someone" arrives, the woman is killed. Then Hellman goes forward in time to her character Ellie Forman, who receives a videotape of this atrocity anonymously. Of course Ellie is instantly involved - she can't help herself - and this time, the police, in the form of one Georgia Davis, are distinctly annoyed. As is Ellie - she feels proprietary about the girl, and wants to know what happened to her. At the same time, Ellie is having romance troubles with David, her boyfriend who has been looking for relatives probably lost in the holocaust ever since she has known him. When a long lost uncle apparently turns up, it throws a wrench in the works.

Hellman is excellent at taking a remarkable event - the discovery of a long lost relative, for example - and writing about it so that it enters the realm of the ordinary and believable. As Ellie is meeting this man, you as the reader are distracted by the same things Ellie is - what is David up to? Any woman who has ever had a date will recognize the tone in David's messages and conversations enough to have a sinking feeling about Ellie's romance.

And Hellmann does the same with the dead woman - by carefully backtracking through this woman's life, you, as reader, come to care for her, making the end we already know about more horrible. There's some fascinating journeys in this book that take you to Russia and all over Europe with the diamond trade - and into the emotional life of this foreign woman that makes her not foreign, just a woman. This is good stuff, and Hellman is a deft and surprising writer who is becoming a solid guarantee of an enjoyable read.

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