INSIDE OUT

A troubled transsexual is the latest target in Horizon House, Dr. Natalie Price’s Boston facility for convicts making a transition to their release.

Lynn Ingram’s life wasn’t easy even when she was Larry. Her gender-reassignment surgery torpedoed both her relationship with her parents and, more spectacularly, her affair with attorney Matthew Slater, who reacted to the news that his lover had been born a man by launching an attack that ended by sending her to prison and him to the cemetery. Now that she’s served a term for manslaughter, Lynn’s out of prison but not out of danger. Somebody’s slashed her and left her for dead in a Dumpster—somebody who also has an eye on her former cellmate, Suzanne Holden, the druggie prostitute mother whose cute little boy, Jakie, is the son of Nat’s lover, Boston cop Leo Coscarelli. Is the killer (a string of more successful attacks are right around the corner) Dr. Harrison Bell, the anesthesiologist Lynn worked with as a pain-management specialist? Peter Everett, the father whose revulsion from his son/daughter was so great that he moved away and changed his name? Rodney Bartlett, the protective brother of Slater’s widow? Or an old acquaintance who abused Lynn while she was in the state’s custody?

Like Nat’s debut (Killing Time, 2002), a mix of tough talk, imperiled women and their kids and pets, and men behaving badly—this time including a killer has to strain to stand out.