Chilling and Twisty: New Thriller from Erin Kelly, HE SAID/SHE SAID

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“The twists in what “love” means and how people create their own strange moral universes are classic Kelly, and reminiscent of Barbara Vine at her spookiest.”

 

Minotaur’s reprint of Erin Kelly’s 2018 thriller makes this British page-turner available on the American side of “the pond” and demonstrates once again that Kelly is a true master of psychological suspense and chilling twists. As the author has said of herself, “My job is to imagine a strange situation and ask the question that will make it stranger still.”

 

In 2015, the charming young couple Kit and Laura live in London, expecting twins. He’s still going to travel, in order to witness a solar eclipse, the theme of his life so far—but he’s planned it carefully and made sure Laura will have support and protection while he’s gone. It’s not just the somewhat risky twin pregnancy that worried him: More than 15 years ago, when the two met at a summertime eclipse festival, Laura had witnessed a crime, and the trauma still haunts them both. The victim, clearly terribly disturbed, has stalked and hunted them to such an extent that they now live as close to “off the grid” as urban people can manage: no social media, assumed names, and more.

 

But will the very frightening “Beth” be able to identify them, now that Laura’s photo has shown up briefly on a media site, and Kit is predictably headed to the eclipse event? She knows about his lifelong passion—will she track him down?

 

Kelly frames this thriller around the phases of a solar eclipse, mimicking in plot what the sun’s disappearance does: an edge of overlap, a sparkling ring allowed for a bit, then total darkness, and the slow journey back to normal. For Laura in particular, this involves recapitulating the trial in which she’d taken part, the crime itself, the levels of threat.

 

With his voice alternating to tell another side, Kit reveals how threatened he feels by upcoming fatherhood and being potentially eclipsed himself by the babies on the way. Kelly’s use of first-person narratives means the of 15 years earlier are presented repeatedly. Kit fingers a knife, contemplating how far he’d go to protect his wife: “Would I tell Laura? Could I tell Laura? Could she live with me? Even knowing I only acted for her, would she still love me?”

 

But there’s an alternate set of facts hidden in the shadows, and only the small question of self-doubt from Kelly’s characters will begin to reveal what’s been transformed by time and lies.

 

The twists in what “love” means and how people create their own strange moral universes are classic Kelly, and reminiscent of Barbara Vine at her spookiest. Strands of deceit creep out of the narratives like ectoplasm in a séance, curling into the air and bringing lies back to life. There are few innocents in He Said/She Said—other than those twins on the way. Good luck spotting the others, before the house of cards comes tumbling down in blood and manipulation.

 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Intense and Chilling Thriller Set in Vermont, I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM by Eric Rickstad

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“When Wayland becomes convinced that he’s witnessed some sleight of hand—that the death he witnessed was not his father’s but someone else’s—his passionate defense of the theory is based on the mysterious message he’d found.”

EricRickstad’s latest Vermont thriller presents a psychological mystery with stunning twists—perfectly paced and carefully constructed so that each startling new direction fits perfectly with what’s gone before, yet feels utterly unpredictable. That’s the ideal balance for this can’t-put-it-down novel crammed with sinister foreboding and family trauma.

I Am Not Who You Think I Am is titled with the words that eight-year-old Wayland Maynard discovers, in his father’s handwriting after he sees his father kill himself. Or is that what he’s actually seen? With age and maturity come questioning, and soon Wayland has a set of alternatives he’s desperate to prove and explain.

A child’s view provides an ultimately unreliable narrator, and at first, Wayland’s first-person narrative reveals the affection between his parents, and a possible weakness in his father. “I have pieced together enough to know that what happened on the day of the Incident was not done because he was a bad man. A bad father. It was done because … well, we’ll get to that. This isn’t some magic trick where the secret machinations are kept hidden. No. This is all about the reveal. The truth.”

But which parts of the child’s memories are relevant truths? Is it the tall threatening man who visited his father’s barber shop? “My father’s shears nicked my ear. I yelped. Blood trickled from my notched flesh. My father didn’t notice. His eyes were locked on the figure in the doorway. Dead leaves danced around the stranger’s feet. I felt a chill from the air that carried the tang of autumnal decay.”

Though Rickstad declares this novel to be a new direction for him, the vivid portrayal of place and threat will be familiar to those who’ve read his other books, like The Silent Girls. The tale quickly complicates as Wayland begins to share his investigation with Juliette, who sets his adolescent hormones and perceptions spinning and who is at least as strange and prone to vanishing as his family. When Wayland becomes convinced that he’s witnessed some sleight of hand—that the death he witnessed was not his father’s but someone else’s—his passionate defense of the theory is based on the mysterious message he’d found. And he poses the most critical issue: “Q: If it wasn’t your father, where is your father now? A: I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Find out what they did to him.”

Some of the answers seem to be in the hands of the town’s most wealthy and reclusive citizens, and Wayland places himself in extreme danger, trying to discover the secrets he knows they are keeping from him. When the final twist arrive, it’s not just Wayland who will be shocked—and the mood of love mingled with deception never lets up for a moment.

Rickstad makes it clear that it took both The Story Factory and the unusual tilt of Blackstone Books to allow him to swerve into this powerful diversion of narrative and suspended disbelief. Three more books are promised. Which should be, in fact, as good a return on investment as young Wayland will get for his desperate investigation.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Indelible Darkness: THE HOUSE OF ASHES by Stuart Neville

In a fierce and powerful twist away from his crime fiction that roots in Ireland's "Troubles," Stuart Neville's September 7 release THE HOUSE OF ASHES (Soho Crime) is a stand-alone stirring the tides of domestic violence. Narrated in two time periods -- a dread-saturated present-day one of Sara Keane, newly arrived in Northern Ireland with an abusive and criminal husband (and his much more frightening father), and a set of multiple murder recollections from 60 years back, in the mind of the elderly Mary Jackson, more or less incarcerated in a "care" home -- this hardboiled thriller paints a shattering image of how absolute power becomes absolute control. Of life, itself.

More than the actual plot, the power of THE HOUSE OF ASHES comes from its blunt revelation of men's potential brutality. It's hard to connect this to the politically scented preceding Neville novels: There's nothing in either Sara's abusers (vintage mob-style dominators) or Mary's (three men who treat women as rape-able animals and kill of their babies) that can be tied directly to the emotional trauma of Irish life. Except one morsel, delivered early in the book through Sara's eyes:

[Sara] had met Damien at the University of Bath, he a postgrad architecture student, she in her second year of studying for a social work degree. She would never have imagined, even after they married, that she would come to live in the place he never ever called Northern Ireland. Always the North, the North of Ireland, sometimes the Six Counties, but never Northern Ireland. As if to speak its name would shame him.

Their move to a house that Damien's father has purchased and rebuilt for them—from a fire-struck wreck—is supposed to be a fresh start, removing Sara from the place where she'd had a breakdown and installing Damien as an architect in his father's property development firm.

But the arrival of a confused elderly woman at the house shatters Sara's preoccupation with staying obedient and blind, and as Mary Jackson's background becomes clear, Sara can't close her eyes to her own situation.

This is a work of psychological horror, drenched in blood, death, and sexual abuse. Perhaps only Stuart Neville could bend the arc of narrative in such a way as to make the story compelling. The terrors revealed and persisting match the book against such classics as Silence of the Lambs, but Neville leaves open the possibility that either Sara or Mary may escape the surrounding real-life nightmare.

It would be comforting to think that this fictional version is a wild exaggeration of abuse that doesn't actually take place in real life. Unfortunately, despite the persisting paranormal threads that are so classically Neville's, this crime novel makes real situations violently present and unforgettable. Read at your own risk ... but trust that the author also knows what impels survival and escape.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Investigator in Pain, Revealing the Cost of Murder, in R. J. Ellory's THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER

The moment I opened the American publication of R. J. Ellory's THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER, I knew I was hooked. Although I spread my reading time for the nearly 400 pages over several days, I would have loved to skip work and just stay on the couch with this book. Not only does it probe life in a sleepy Mississippi town, with a pointed finger trailing through voodoo as well as murder -- but it probes the residue of the Vietnam War through the flashbacks and soul-deep damage to investigator John Gaines. Here's the first paragraph, under the chapter heading "Wednesday, July 24, 1974":

When the rains came, they found the girl's face. Just her face. At least that was how it appeared. And then came her hand -- small and white and fine like porcelain. It surfaced from the black mud and showed itself. Just her face and her hand, the rest of her still submerged. To look down the riverbank and see just her hand and her face was surreal and disturbing. And John Gaines -- who had lately, and by providence or default, come to the position of sheriff of Whytesburg, Breed County, Mississippi, and before that had come alive from the nine circles of hell that was the war in Vietnam, who was himself born in Lafayette, a Louisianan from the start -- crouched on his haunches and surveyed the scene with a quiet mind and a steady eye.

This is what we demand of our best crime-solving people: a quiet mind and a steady eye, and an inner recognition of the horrors and pain embedded in violence. If only it could all be balanced neatly! But as Gaines will soon discover, to probe the roots of this death will also mean reactivating his own most terrible memories of the war, and facing what it has done to him.

The body surfacing from the muddy river bank turns out to be that of Nancy Denton. When she was just 16, two decades earlier, she'd gone for a walk in the Whytesburg woods -- and never returned. Very quickly, John Gaines realizes hers is not a recent death, but perhaps one that dates to the day of her disappearance. How has the body been preserved? What actions were taken before it found a resting place? And who felt the need to kill this lovely young woman?

Gaines is an inexperienced sheriff, driven by poignant and forceful memories of killing and survival in the Vietnam jungles, as well as by a longing to have his returned-to-America life carry some goodness, some meaning, and deep justice. He soon finds that Nancy's teen years took place in a small group of close friends, where romances were both budding and frustrated. And a powerful Southern family, the Wades, is somehow involved in covering up what happened 20 years earlier.

Gaines's most direct route back to the "cold case" is through another veteran, this one of an earlier war: Michael Webster, one of the lucky ones who returned from live action in World War II, minus all the others in his fighting group. Could it be Michael, with his own raw PTSD, who killed Nancy Denton? One of the Wade family members, defending Michael, challenges Gaines to go easy on this veteran so similar in some ways to himself:

"You are perhaps made of stronger stuff than Lieutenant Webster. Some men are just a little more fragile than others, you know?"

"You're telling me that he is the victim here? Are you f**ing crazy?"

"Oh, I am saying nothing of the sort, Sheriff. I am well aware that a heinous crime has been perpetrated here, that some poor girl was abused and murdered, but this was all twenty years ago ... I just think Michael Webster is incapable of establishing any kind of stable ground for his own defense, and I would like to think I am assisting him with his constitutional right to fair representation when it comes to his day in court."

"This is just bullsh**, if you don't mind me saying, Mr. Wade."

What Gaines suspects, beyond the possible violent act in the past by Webster, is that Wade himself is somehow involved in the coverup, for reasons of his own. Or could Wade have been the killer?

It's complicated. And Sheriff John Gaines can't get to the truth without sorting his own war memories and what they have done to his capacity to be human, to be caring, to take part in community.

Don't be confused by earlier releases of the book in the United Kingdom; this is the American release, orchestrated by Overlook. If, like me, you carry conflicting emotions and memories of the Vietnam War years, here is a potent narrative in which to reconsider your own past, as well as the country's. And if you value a crime novel that probes the vulnerability and courage of the mind -- as Charles Todd has done with his World War I-era detectives, for instance -- you'll want the book on your shelf for repeated reading. Add it also to novels of the South and the grief and beauty entwined there.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Spymaster Mick Herron's Stand-Alone, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

I'm a major fan of Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" espionage novels. They're British and embedded in the classic MI5 framework -- but with a major twist that provides protagonists who are "failed spies," people who've messed up some major operation but can't be simply fired because they already know too much. Stashed among the misfits at Slough (pronounced Slow) House, they wither in their own estimation and in the noxious atmosphere provided by their "head of station."

So when I opened Herron's January 2018 offering, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED, I kept expecting some connection back to the Slow Horses team, and when 26-year-old Maggie Barnes began to suspect she was being recruited for either industrial or international espionage, I started turning the pages even more rapidly than before. (Herron's storytelling is compelling ... his books are really, really hard to put down.)

My mistake. Unless I missed a very small mention (and I don't think I did), none of the Slow Horses spies turn up in this stand-alone suspense novel. Maggie, turned loose as a temporary infiltration agent, could be any one of us -- how would you do if thrust into a life-and-death, possible prison condition in a matter of hours after work one day? Who could save you??

Herron shapes a novella of psychological suspense in THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. I won't shelve it on my Slow Horses section, but rather next to some work by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell in her most twisted voice) and maybe even Stephen King, for the all-too-human pain involved. It's quite a read ... hope you pick up a copy to experience this other side of Herron's craft.

Slow Horses fans, keep in mind June 5, 2018, when the next in this series releases in the US: London Rules. Many thanks to Soho Crime for helping Herron keep these on a roll.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Complete Collected Mysteries of Grand Master Margaret Millar

About two weeks ago, Syndicate Books -- distributed by crime fiction marvel Soho Press -- released the first of a massive seven-volume set that will offer the complete works of Margaret Millar.

And for many a mystery fan, the most pressing mystery is: Who was Margaret Millar, and why don't we know her books already?

Think back to when you began reading the classic mystery authors. I know who I read: Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and my mother's copies of Earle Stanley Gardiner and John Dickson Carr. Then Mignon Eberhart, John D. MacDonald, Graham Greene, even Ngaio Marsh. These have all been named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. The award began in 1955 with Agatha Christie; many others named since then have written for so long that I think of them as my own contemporaries instead of my mother's -- John Le Carré, Tony Hillerman, Donald E. Westlake, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

But I missed a few, and I think it's no accident that Margaret Millar's work was among them. Deeply disturbing, psychologically intense, probing, and really truly creepy in their pace and suspense, her books -- like Vanish in an Instant and Beast in View -- are books I could not have absorbed well during the anxious and hectic college years and then childrearing. Now, however, their power and finely honed craft make an immediate impression.

It's not easy to find Millar's books in bookstores; even in the online sources of used books, they're not plentiful. So it's a huge gift to find the first collected volume of COLLECTED MILLAR, subtitled The Master at Her Zenith, as a freshly issued oversized paperback (9 by 6 inches, and 1.5 inches thick, 533 pages). Unlike the "old" softcovers familiar to collectors, this one is sturdy and well bound, to rest comfortably (if heavily) in the hands. And what a source!

Not only has this central volume of five of Millar's novels been released -- the remaining six are scheduled to follow briskly, this month for Legendary Novels of Suspense and the others in 2017: in January, March, May, June, and July (the last volume is her memoir and nature writing).

I found the insistent tightening of suspense in Vanish in an Instant reminiscent of watching a Hitchcock film playing out -- here's a sample of the writing:

Cordwick picked up the wrinkled bloodstained trench coat, quite naturally and casually, as if it was an ordinary piece of clothing. There was no indication, in his movements or expression, of his extreme distaste for the sight of blood, the feelings it gave him, of loss, futility, vulnerability. The blood on this worn and dirty coat had been the end of a man and might be the end of another.

He said calmly, "Do you, for instance, recognize this coat, Mrs. Hearst?"

"I -- don't know.. It's so wrinkled. I can't ... what are those marks?"

"Blood."

She drew in her breath suddenly, gaspingly, like an exhausted swimmer.

Beyond Hitchcock, the rich literary writing also reminds me of Henning Mankell's work, and the pained examination of emotions might well be a response to those who accuse crime fiction of wanton violence. In Millar's writing, every wound, every death, is shockingly real.

Feminist, Grand Master, sustained powerful author, Millar merits more reading today. I'm glad to see this series in print, and recommend it for many a collection of strong crime fiction.

World War II Horror from F. R. Tallis, THE PASSENGER

Mystery readers may know F. R. Tallis better under his other name, Frank Tallis, with which he brings out crime fiction, especially books set in Vienna. Like Ruth Rendell setting aside her most twisted and cunning psychological fiction to her pen name Barbara Vine, Tallis's two names allow a darker side to flourish vividly without the predictability of today's mystery genre.

THE PASSENGER is the fourth in the F. R. Tallis horror titles, all independent but also curiously linked by the powerful resonances among them: the chilling effect of voices not quite heard, of recorded versions of ourselves, of "deviant" forms of spiritual search that take the searcher out of the usual "communion" of belief. This time, Tallis probes a different culture, the intense intimacy of a submarine crew during World War II. The nationality of this crew -- Germans at the turning point of the war, just as America agrees to join the European conflict -- adds to the eerie distancing and terror that Tallis creates in the narrative.

Siegfried Lorenz, a skilled U-boat commander but a political skeptic, knows and excels at his real work: to comprehend the emotions and interactions of his crewmen and induce them to exert their best skills, within a "communion" of mutual effort and attachment. He inclines to more mercy than the Fuehrer's commandants are expected to show -- not only does he refrain from slaughtering survivors at sea, but he presents them with a bit of survival gear that his crew can spare, and leaves them with shards of hope.

So it's ironic that a special mission for his submarine results in the sudden deaths of two prisoners on board, and Lorenz can prevent none of the twists of fate: not the deaths, nor the apparent run of bad luck that follows, complete with what must be hallucinations, the appearance that one of the dead men is haunting Lorenz's sub, determined to undermine his command and the safety of his crew.

Lorenz makes the most of his brief relief between missions to seek information from an elderly doctor named Hebbel, a friend of his family in Berlin. In Tallis's framing, this interlude is the last moment Lorenz can claim as under his control in any sense:

'A curious thing happened on our last patrol,' said Lorenz, affecting an attitude of casual disregard. 'We were transporting a British prisoner who unfortunately dies before we could get him back to base for questioning. Shortly after, one of my mechanics had an accident -- he banged his head on a diesel engine -- and from that moment onward he kept on babbling about having seen the dead man.'

'The brain is a remarkable organ,' the doctor responded. 'But uniquely vulnerable.'

Under Lorenz's continued pressure and questions, the doctor finally gives his professional opinion on the hallucinations that Lorenz poses as a hypothetical -- but that are far worse than that. The doctor explains:

'The unconscious: that part of the mind that is not accessible to introspection. Deeper and wider than any ocean you have explored, my dear fellow, infinitely deep. ... Hallucinations might represent some kind of communication from the unconscious. ... if a person were, let us say, in some kind of danger, then the hallucinations might be construed as a warning.'

There are, of course, almost no moments when submariners are NOT in some kind of danger.

Tallis braids the complexity of the mind and spirit with the pagan symbolism chosen by leaders of the Third Reich, and lets Lorenz recount the battle, both personal and literal, erupting from the conflict of his humane beliefs and his tender care of his crew, versus the demands of German (or any) warfare.

Although THE PASSENGER is not a typical fit for the crime fiction genre -- even less so than Tallis's 2014 title The Voices (reviewed here) -- the depths and currents explored turn out to mesh with the darkness that lies within modern crime. The author is also a psychologist, and readers access the richness of  the practice, probing the strengths and dangers of the mind.

If you're reading the post World War I crime fiction of Charles Todd, the World War II mysteries by James Benn, or the classic "Regeneration Trilogy" from Pat Barker, THE PASSENGER will fit well with your exploration. Dark, direct, and chilling, it's an excellent read, deftly paced for psychological suspense and a very believable brush with the supernatural. I won't forget the terrors -- or the strong assertions -- of this well-written "gothic" novel with its ocean of symbols and its stormy crises.

Depths of Evil, Roots of Crime, in THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND, Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville is the master of "Belfast Noir," gritty crime fiction set in and around Belfast, Northern Ireland. The port city is a living memorial to "The Troubles" -- the political and religious fever that drove Neville's earlier series, where violence kept emerging in successive family generations, responding to the horrors and repression of the 20th century (which, let's face it, were rooted in turn in the "Potato Famine" oppression).

In THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND, Neville forsakes his series and its close ties to recent history. Instead, through two powerful women in law enforcement and a pair of very damaged brothers, he probes the nature of evil and the way it spreads. The contagion of the murder committed by 12-year-old Ciaran Devine and his older brother Thomas has infected DCI Serena Flanagan, who received Ciaran's confession eight years earlier.

Flanagan's never quite believed the confession, though. Maternal instincts, perhaps? The young foster child seemed too vulnerable, too much manipulated by his darker brother. And it's clear to Flanagan that Ciaran's insistence on being the only killer of the boys' foster father -- leaving Thomas as accomplice -- has saved Thomas from a lengthy prison sentence and made sure that Ciaran's own was "just" the eight years assigned to a child.

Flanagan's kept her doubts close to her chest. But that, in turn, has festered: Her return to police work at the same time of Ciaran's release from prison is a return from radiation treatment for breast cancer. Although she's not especially introspective, Neville leaves little doubt that Flanagan's urge to pull young Ciaran -- now a hormonally confused young man -- to her breast may be a toxic mistake.

Then there's Paula Cunningham, the dedicated Probation Service officer who'll escort Ciaran out of prison and into the monitored life ahead of him.

Cunningham had entered the Probation Service twelve years ago ... As a postgraduate student, she had spent summers working on the wards of psychiatric units, then a year in Maghaberry prison, counselling inmates. She had learned things in those days that would stay with her until her last breath, like the terrible cost of casual violence, and how poorly the system dealt with those who inflicted it.

But was the action of the Devine boys casual violence, or was it planned revenge? And what revenge may the surviving family member of that long-ago foster household desire?

While the twisted menace of Ciaran and Thomas is a meticulous portrait of how abuse can blossom as violence, Neville's compelling investigation of what drives DCI Flanagan becomes the counterstroke of the plot.

Flanagan had seen many murder scenes. The ugliness of the act, the indignity of it. ... Sudden and violent death rarely visited those with stable lives, with loving families, with purpose to their days. More often than not, murder happened on drunken nights between friends brought together by their mutual dependencies, petty arguments exploding into bloodshed, kitchen knives buried in throats, heads cracked open by heavy objects. No planning, no intent, only rage unleashed.

But this was different.

Flanagan's effort to get Ciaran to tell the truth involves showing him that he can survive without being a puppet of his malicious older brother. But by threatening the bond of the brothers, Flanagan unleashes a tide of rage and violence against all the people around them -- especially these two women in law enforcement. Is it worth it? How good are her instincts? What evidence can there be, or what subsequent admissions?

Don't look for quintessential "Irishness" in this one -- aside from the scraps of Belfast language and the slightly different criminal justice system, THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND could take place in any harsh urban environment, even in a suburb. And that broad application, coupled with relentless insight into abuse and its consequences, is what makes this book an instant classic of crime and investigation.

There's a rumor that Flanagan will be a series character herself. That's good news: Stuart Neville's decision to confront crime's long roots may benefit us all. And to publisher Soho Crime, again -- thanks.

From Europe to Texas, Mark Pryor Moves for HOLLOW MAN

I'm a huge fan of Mark Pryor's Hugo Marston series, set in Europe (mostly circling around Paris) where Marston, a retired FBI profiler, provides security for the U.S. Embassy. (Reviews here!)  The Reluctant Matador was the 2015 title in this series, so it's intriguing to have an extra Mark Pryor book in the same year, and this one's billed as a standalone: HOLLOW MAN.

You don't need to know the T. S. Eliot poem that provides the title -- it's clear right away that Domenic, the narrator, is a psychopath, making his way as a Texas prosecutor with a performed set of emotions that he doesn't really feel. Or at least, his versions of them are very different. He's interested, intrigued, annoyed, even angry, but kindness, for him, is a matter of calculating what's in his best interest. A job transfer to a less compelling and less profitable division distresses him. But in the process, the possibility of creating a "perfect crime" arises, and of course, he can't walk away from the challenge.

But I did resist. I had to. It's one thing being unable to get off the slide once you begin; it's quite another to step onto that slippery slope with your eyes wide open. I'd trained myself that being a functional human being meant, for me, recognizing dangerous situations and steering around them. Not resisting the temptations, but avoiding them in the first place. I was the serial adulterer hiring an ugly secretary, or the booze-hound driving the long way home to avoid his local liquor store.

"Prosecutors don't steal cars," I said. "Not this one, anyway."

"It's not stealing," she said, "if you give it back. It's not even borrowing. It's teaching him a lesson."

I've got very mixed reactions to this one. Pryor's writing is compelling and convincing, and the plot he provides is neatly twisted and well paced. But I found I was uneasy "identifying" with this narrator. Maybe I should be used to it -- the Wyatt books from Garry Disher are equally disturbing in terms of being inside a psychopath's mind. But Disher's Wyatt has weak spots in his personal defenses, and takes some risks for others at odd but significant moments, and I find myself on his side. For Domenic, a cautious emotional distance fits much better. I wanted to like him, but all in all, I didn't -- and I wouldn't necessarily prioritize reading another book from his point of view. (Good thing for me it's a standalone, then.)

What did intrigue me mightily was seeing author Mark Pryor make the shift to the Texas setting, where he is himself a transplanted Englishman and an assistant district attorney. I appreciated his know-how on both the legal career and the effect of changing countries. (He has a family and does not appear to be a psychopath himself, I'm glad to note.)

After the already-mentioned Australian Wyatt series and of course the Dexter books, plus Dave Zeltersman's series, I found Pryor's psychopath approach less than satisfying, the the plot was more predictable than I like. But other readers have found the ending surprising. If you like really dark noir and the tension of crossing a legal career into crime, check out HOLLOW MAN. From Seventh Street Books, a publisher that keeps on impressing me with its reach and range.

Psychological Suspense: THE DOLL'S HOUSE, Louise Phillips (Ireland)

Louise Phillips is a best-selling author in Ireland; it may take a while, in the current flood of imported crime fiction, for American readers to catch up with her. After her dark and complex debut with Red Ribbons, Hachette Ireland now offers her second book, THE DOLL'S HOUSE, to the U.S. market, in softcover.

Forget any notion of Ibsen or other dollhouse images -- in this case, a young woman, Clodagh Hamilton -- that's her maiden name, but it's the important one -- is struggling to hold onto her newly gained sobriety, while her husband batters her both emotionally and physically, and her desperate search for sanity forces her to investigate the long-ago family issues around the death of her father, Adrian Hamilton. Accident, or something more sinister? And why did her mother stop loving her, when she was just seven years old?

When Clodagh enlists a hypnotherapist to help part the clouds of the past, her frightening gains of memory turn her into a target for the forces of the past. As the plot lines tangle, it's clear that the only chance there is for Clodagh's survival will depend on criminal psychologist Dr Kate Pearson catching up with related deaths and motives, in time to reach the truth.

And the doll's house? That's the one from Clodagh's childhood -- the one where, each time she regresses to the past, the dolls take on personalities and sharp voices that warn and threaten. Sure, the voices are those of her own past ... but which ones can she trust, and which are childhood misunderstandings or malicious misleading?

The pace is tight, the emotions piercing, and the connections between Clodagh and Kate -- whom we've met in Red Ribbons and whose own life is rapidly fracturing around the end of a relationship -- turn out to be both significant and suspenseful. The clock is ticking, and there's reason to believe that destruction and abuse are multiplying.

No, there's nothing particularly "Irish" to this crime novel -- it's built on clearly inked characters, not on the history or traditions of the Emerald Isle -- yet the chilling criminal maneuvers subtly echo the evil that, say, Stuart Neville taps into so readily. Everything here depends on Clodagh and Kate. Struggling with them through the action, readers know exactly how vulnerable each one is. Does the perpetrator know this, also?

Author website here: http://www.louise-phillips.com.

Brief Mention: Andrea Kane, THE STRANGER YOU KNOW

During this very strange Super Bowl game evening, I confess I've been distracted -- I hope my lack of attention didn't contribute to the Denver disaster. Sigh. Superstition runs rife among sports fans and writers. There is one sports fan in the house, and one writer who makes sports-related kitchen efforts. You can probably guess which of us is which.

In the process of fine-tuning the chicken wings recipe and excavating a heap of books in the kitchen (hey, you know how distraction goes), I found a title that I should have reviewed back in October, when it was released: THE STRANGER YOU KNOW by Andrea Kane. It's the latest to feature the "Forensic Instincts" team: headed by Casey Woods, and specializing in behavioral and forensic psychology. I like the generous and strong characters, the quick thriller-style pacing, and the carefully shaded modern noir note here. Kane's earlier titles brought out by Mira (the crime fiction side of Harlequin) are The Girl Who Disappeared Twice and The Line Between Here and Gone.

While I'm sorry to be late mentioning Kane and this latest title, I am glad to see the book is coming out in paperback in March. If you're a pre-order person and you'd like to sample this line of well-crafted psychological sleuthing, here's a good moment to mark Kane onto your list.

Kane is a long-time author of romantic thrillers and historical romances as well, and she's a Jersey Girl; I hope we'll see another title from her soon. Author website here.