THE LONG DIVISION

A housecleaner yields to temptation, and unintended consequences murderously follow.

Having found a fat stack of bills taped inside a toilet bowl, Jodie Larkin faces one of those existential moments. It’s late on a Friday, the end of a typically grinding week, and Jodie’s bone-weary. In that mood, she accepts $5,000 as nothing more than fitting compensation for a variety of slings and arrows she suffers daily and slides the money into the pocket of her Kwik Kleen uniform. Soon thereafter—larceny begetting larceny—she steals a car and heads north from Atlanta to Cape Fear, N.C., acting almost without volition, as if hard-wired. And in a way she is. Jodie, 32, is drawn inexorably by Calvin, the 15-year-old son she gave up for adoption when he was a baby. Meanwhile, Deputy Sheriff Sam Hartwick stops a car, accepts a bribe from the teenage driver, then allows the vehicle to continue on its journey. More consequences of an unintended nature follow for Sam, who’s married to Jodie’s sister and has the kind of shameful history with Jodie that’s inevitably the prelude to heart-rending disaster.

An elegantly written second novel (Pyres, 2007) so full of hopelessly lost people that readers should be warned: Depression may ensue.