A FAMILIAR SIGHT

The Boston police reluctantly ask a nonviolent sociopath to catch a sadistic psychopath.

“I messed up, Gretch,” attorney Lena Booker, who specializes in defending poor kids and mob bosses, voicemails her old friend, consulting psychiatrist Gretchen White. When she gets the message, Gretchen rushes to Lena’s side, but it’s too late to save Lena’s life. The obvious client she was referring to is Viola Kent, accused of killing her mother even though she’s only 13. What if, against all the evidence, Viola, whose floridly sociopathic tendencies have been well documented for years, was actually innocent of stabbing Claire Kent 13 times? Since she’s a higher-functioning sociopath herself, Gretchen would seem to be the perfect investigator to cast a cold eye over the alternative suspects: Reed Kent, Claire’s husband and Viola’s long-suffering father; his sister, Ainsley; and Lena’s lover, Congressman Declan Murphy, whose sister, Tess Murphy, Reed’s high school sweetheart and Lena’s best friend, vanished more than 20 years ago. But Detective Patrick Shaughnessy, who’s always suspected Gretchen of stabbing her aunt to death when she was 8, is so obsessed by the similarities that make Claire's murder an all-too-familiar sight that he’s far from ready to trust anything Gretchen purports to discover. As Labuskes cuts frantically between the present and past segments from weeks, months, years, and decades before Claire’s death, it becomes disturbingly more and more clear that “genetics loaded the gun, environment pulled the trigger.”

A horrific brew for readers willing to immerse themselves in it.