THE LOST DIARIES OF IRIS WEED

The latest of Law’s elegantly written stories (The Night Bus, 2000, etc.) focuses on Jason (“Lars”) Larson, a respected professor of literature at a prestigious Connecticut university. Though he loves his wife Emma, also a teacher, and his young daughter Cookie, he’s not above the occasional flirtation, sometimes more. His present infatuation is with student Iris Weed, beautiful, vibrant, and immensely talented, living in a truck and writing a journal she hopes to publish someday. Iris resists Lars’s more serious advances, presumably in favor of the suitor her journal calls Sven. When Iris is found stabbed to death in a campus park, Lars is a primary suspect. The police question him endlessly, but without nailing him or anybody else for the murder. Two years later, after Lars, in collaboration with Iris’s mother Isobel, has had her journal published to much acclaim, a series of messages to his computer accuse him of the murder and eventually threaten his family. Lars suspects that it must be the mysterious Sven—and that he’s Iris’s killer. But not until he single-handedly rescues 11-year-old Cookie from certain death are the police convinced and the case closed.

A fascinating look at the inner workings of academia, an intense character study, and a tension-filled plot: Law’s best so far.