The mysterious cover art and all the effusive cover blurbs on this novel might have you thinking that you’re in for a dark, intelligent, suspenseful read. Well, forget it. Gayle Lynds ain’t no John LeCarre, and Mosaic is pure froth.

Julia Austrian, a beautiful concert pianist, is afflicted with psychosomatic blindness. One night, just before a concert, she regains her sight. After the concert, she witnesses the brutal murder of her mother by a female assassin. The killer, assuming that Julia cannot see her, spares her life. This event is so traumatic that Julia’s blindness returns.

Meanwhile, an old man languishes in a nursing home/prison, desperate to make contact with the outside world. At the same time, an unscrupulous, greedy megalomaniac is running for President of the United States. At the same time, a restless CIA agent is on a quest for the fabled lost treasure known as the Amber Room (which will be familiar to readers of Elizabeth Lowell’s Amber Beach). All these events are, of course, connected.

Julia is a beautiful and talented woman whose blindness has always been a medical mystery. Since she can’t identify her mother’s murderer (because she’s blind again), she is determined to regain her sight. Others are equally determined that she be silenced before she can do so. She pairs up with Sam Keeline, the aforementioned restless CIA agent, as they outwit her pursuers, untangle the mystery, and fall in love.

It isn’t easy to write good suspense. The writers who do it well are masters of misdirection: they make you believe one thing, which distracts you from what is really going on. In Mosaic, the plot moves, in a stately fashion, directly from point A to point B to point C, faithfully making sure that the reader is informed of each and every secret and hidden agenda. The result is a novel that has all the relentless nail-biting tension of a Roman Catholic Mass.

The plot is outrageous, a string of coincidences so staggering that it’s almost embarrassing to read them. The author’s writing style frequently lapses into meandering lists of irrelevant details – she makes sure you know the make and color of the hero’s car, the way the furniture is situated in the presidential candidate’s office, and the fact that one of the villains prefers Johnny Walker Blue to single malt. The book is studded with amusing turns of phrase, like this one: “He leaned back to watch the monitor go through its gyrations.” Has your monitor ever gyrated? In addition to such bizarre descriptions, there is also some strange dialogue, such as when Julie’s psychiatrist informs her that: “You are like the frog on the hot burner. You jump off quickly. But the problem is that now you will avoid all burners, whether they are scorching hot or cool as an autumn day.”

Even with all the absurdities in Mosaic, the pace definitely picks up when Julia and Sam join forces. Lynds does succeed in creating convincing sexual tension between the two. Unfortunately, the love story is never powerful enough to distract from the laughable twists and turns in the plot.

Mosaic can be summed up in one word: trashy. It is to a real espionage novel what a knock-knock joke is to Much Ado About Nothing. But if you’re in the mood for an unintentionally goofy, check-your-brain-at-the-door sort of experience, you’ve just found the right book.