FICTION : TIME OUT OF MIND by John R. Maxim (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95).

This supernatural mystery centers around Jonathan Corbin, a network executive in New York City, who is afraid to go out in mid-town Manhattan snowstorms. He sees the ghosts of streets and people of a hundred years ago, and they get stronger and stronger, threatening to overwhelm his everyday reality. He’s witness to murder, robber baron and boardroom mayhem, and recognizes Teddy Roosevelt and John L. Sullivan swirling about in these visions. No surprise that these ghosts have his girlfriend Gwen worried, who then enlists the help of old family friend Dr. Harry Sturdevant, a specialist in sports medicine and a believer in genetic memory. Corbin isn’t sure what’s happening to him, but through a chain of incidents, he’s coming to believe someone is out to eradicate his whole family line, and they’ve been at it since, well, a hundred years ago. Perhaps Maxim dwells a bit much on the past man rather than on the contemporary one, but the story’s fun-in-Old-New-York anyway. One thing that irritated me is that Corbin calls Gwen “babe,” throughout, perhaps a way to differentiate between then and now.