SEE JANE RUN, by Joy Fielding, Morrow, 364 pages, $20.

One afternoon in June 1990, Jane Whittaker, an attractive young woman in her early 30s, made a heart-stopping discovery. “It came to her without prior hint or warning, as she stood at the corner of Cambridge and Bowdoin in what she recognized was downtown Boston, that while she knew exactly where she was, she had absolutely no idea who she was.”

She carried no purse, whose contents would have revealed her identity, but the pockets of her trenchcoat were stuffed with packets of new hundred-dollar bills. Sometime later, when she opened her trenchcoat, she found that the front of her expensive blue Anna Klein dress was drenched in blood.

“`Stay calm,’ she whispered, searching for clues in the sound of her voice, but even it was unfamiliar to her.”

After a harrowing 24 hours in which she divests herself of the blood-soaked dress and conceals the money in a bus terminal locker, she turns herself in to the police who take her to Boston City Hospital for medical evaluation.

Except for the amnesia, they find nothing wrong. A staff neurologist explains that she is suffering from a condition called a fugue state.

“Everyone has a limit to their tolerance of anxiety. When that limit is reached, some people choose escape through the suddon loss of memory. … Hysterical amnesia is a coping mechanism, a form of self-preservation. … It involves a loss of memory involving a particular period in a person’s life, a period usually associated with great fear, rage, or deep shame and humiliation.”

Soon after, a young female doctor at the hospital recognizes Jane, and the authorities summon her husband.

He is Dr. Michael Whittaker, pediatric surgeon, respected by his colleagues, adored by his young patients and their grateful parents. As she stares at this stranger, it registers on the tabula rasa of her mind that he must be around 40. Tall and handsome, his eyes were pale emerald and his darkened hair hinted of childhood blondness. She observed his surgeon’s hands, long and thin, and their “carefully kept nails.” His manner was disarming, a mix of humility, gentleness, and boyish carm.

“I feel like I’m on a blind date,” he confessed when they were left alone, “and I really want to make a good impression.”

As they drove home in his black BMW, he told her they had been married for 11 years and had a daughter, Emily, who was 7. She was visiting his parents at their cottage on Cape Cod, he said briefly and immediately switched to another subject.

Arrived home, Jane found herself in a spacious, luxurious house in Newton, an affluent superb of Boston. Aglow with color, it was equipped with every creature comfort including an efficient housekeeper, a young woman whose name was Paula. Fanatically devoted to Dr. Whittaker, who had saved the life of her little girl by performing emergency surgery afetr a series of spinal aneurysms, Paula makes no bones about where her allegiance lies. “The man can do no wrong … I’d do anything in the world for him,” she informs Jane.

Jane admits her home is a paradigm of perfection. Michael appears to be perfect, as does Paula. Perplexed, she cannot find any reason for having taken refuge in amnesia. Physically, she feels fine, as she tries to tell Michael that night when he gives her two little white pills. He explains these away on the grounds that they were prescribed by the hospital neurologist.

The next day, while she is still groggy from the pills, Michael gives her a shot whose effect is immediate. Struggling to stay conscious, Jane opens her eyes long enough to see her husband bending over her and brushing back his hair from his forehead. Horrified, she sees a long row of stitches “that snaked along the side of his scalp just above the hairline.” Had she done that to him? She tries to ask but cannot and instead sinks into an abyss of disorderly oblivion.

In the blurred days that follow, Jane — showered with persistent, loving attention and medication administered by her husband, and monitored by the vigilant Paula — becomes a prisoner in her own home. Her address book, nexus to her past, disappears from her bedside table; so does the telephone.

There are no messages from the daughter she does not remember, nor from relatives or friends. Once, when the downstairs phone rings and she manages to eaves-drop from the upstairs hall, she is startled to hear Paula’s voice saying smoothly that Mrs. Whittaker was not there.

“She’s gone to visit her brother for a few weeks … everything’s fine. She just felt like surprising him.” A wave of terror, chill as ice, sweeps through Jane. For some reason she cannot understand, she is in grave peril. She must find out why. But how? This is her deadly dilemma.

Fielding’s prose style, forceful and fast-paced, propels the reader swiftly along the sinister currents of the storyline and explodes in a stunning, shocking denouement. Ancillary to the suspenseful plot is the leit motif that winds through it, of the modern woman’s strugle to find her own sense of self-worth.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”