LYING WITH STRANGERS

A mysterious stalker manipulates a beautiful doctor until she’s suspected of murder in this well-plotted thriller.

Peyton Shields deserves better. The top resident for pediatric medicine at a prestigious Boston hospital, this gorgeous blonde works ridiculous hours and still manages to coax unwilling young patients into giving up the occasional smile. But her lawyer husband, Kevin, resents the time she devotes to her career, not to mention the move to frigid New England the residency forced on him and the snooty law firm that gave him a job. Soon he’s cheating. And even if he immediately regrets his one-night-stand, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Peyton is reeling from a lawsuit, brought about when she fired a shot to defend a teenaged patient. And as she’s trying to make amends, she’s forced off an icy road into Jamaica Pond. As her marriage begins to crumble, an old flame makes a doomed reappearance, and before long, both she and Kevin are on trial for murder. The truth lies with enigmatic stalker Rudy. Evidently delusional, he believes that utterly oblivious women are giving him sexy “signals,” but he’s holding himself together enough to be quite resourceful: filching keys from a car valet, hiring mimes and just generally getting up to mischief in his doomed attempt to act as Peyton’s savior. While some of the plotting is far-fetched, Grippando’s latest keeps the action coming, with just enough justification to make sense of the wilder turns. (Peyton, for example, realizes she misspoke when she confesses at her deposition that she could shoot a person.) In a sly touch, Grippando (When Darkness Falls, 2007, etc.) makes the cheating husband an aspiring author who has penned a thriller about a woman accused of murder.

An unlikely thriller with enough cleanly written action to keep readers engaged.