CLOUDLAND

In this refreshingly cliché-free serial-killer tale, Olshan tries his hand with a female narrator/heroine, whom he handles just as deftly as his sensitive male heroes (The Conversion, 2008, etc.).

Two-and-a-half years and five corpses after Tammy Boucher was stabbed to death in New England’s River Valley, police in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts still don’t have any idea who’s killing these women or why. The forensic evidence is hopeless, and the discovery of Seventh-Day Adventist tracts on some of the victims hardly seems to rise to the level of a clue. After she discovers the sixth victim, long-missing nurse Angela Parker, buried in the thawing snow, Catherine Winslow, a former investigative reporter who’s retreated to Vermont to write a syndicated column of household hints, finds herself drawn into the case and is soon resisting the suggestions of Springfield-based Det. Marco Prozzo, who’s evidently intent on pinning the crimes on knacker Hiram Osmond or painter Paul Winter’s adopted son Wade. Prozzo doesn’t seem to notice several more inviting suspects, from Dr. Anthony Waite, the troubled psychiatrist who’s helping with the investigation, to Matthew Blake, the former college student who’d been Catherine’s lover and is now conveniently returned from Thailand, where he said he’d gone to forget her. Although all these chilly, hurting souls are well worth your time, the real keeper is Catherine, still grieving the death of the husband she’d divorced and the loss of the younger lover she’d pushed away. Even as you wonder who the killer will turn out to be, you’ll worry mainly about how she’s going to come through all this.