Sliver

February 4, 1991
``Horror High-Rise,'' screams a New York City tabloid's headline in Levin's ( Rosemary's Baby ) new fast-moving, made-for-TV-style thriller. A fashionable Upper East Side apartment building is the site of the fifth unlikely death in recent years, but new tenant Kay Norris, a divorced, chichi book editor originally from Wichita, Kan., is not overly worried. Nor is she fazed when her hot new boyfriend Pete Henderson confides that he is the building's low-profile owner, and that he has been spying on all the tenants for years using video cameras hidden in their apartments. ``Petey, it's wrong . . . it's something you have to put behind you,'' head-over-heels Kay implores this seductively charming psychopath. Dorothy, another displaced Kansan, showed more common sense in Oz than does this hapless heroine in the Big Apple. Kay physically resembles Pete's deceased mother, a famous old-time actress, a coincidence that links residents of the high-rise to a dark past. In a slam-bang finale, Kay is rescued by her cat, who has more vitality than this lame, formulaic tale. Literary Guild main selection.