IRREPARABLE DAMAGE

The heavy-handed nightmare of a squeaky-clean divorced dad’s ordeal when an innocent photo ends up getting him charged with child abuse.

Playing with his six-year-old daughter Penny while she’s taking a bath, novelist Stephen Barrow takes some photos of her shampoo-spiked hairdo and snaps one last shot while she’s mooning him. He thinks he’s out of film, but he isn’t, and the zealous clerk at the drugstore that develops the roll is only the first of a long line of concerned citizens—justice-system bureaucrats, incompetent journalists, politically vulnerable jurists, and experts determined to ride the gravy train—who railroad him into a holding cell on multiple charges of possessing a sexual performance of a child and endangering the welfare of a minor. His head spinning in disbelief and shock, Stephen is instantly barred from contact with Penny, who’s placed with her vindictive mother Ada and farmed out twice a week to child counselor Cathy Silverman, who feeds her leading questions in hope of making Columbia County District Attorney Jim Hall happy and fattening her own bank account. Except for sympathetic Flynt Adams, his court-appointed attorney, and Theresa Mulholland, the sensitive reporter initially assigned to cover the case, everybody who crosses Stephen’s path assumes this is “a clear-cut case of abuse,” and most of the major players outside the DA’s office also seem utterly clueless about the justice system, giving Klempner (Flat Lake in Winter, 1999, etc.) the chance for lots and lots of exposition clarifying the difference between civil and criminal cases, bench and jury trials, grounds for dismissal and grounds for the not-guilty verdict that seems hopelessly out of Stephen’s reach—unless, of course, the prosecution puts Penny on the stand.

A torridly paced read that hastens to its foreordained conclusion impeded by the slightest subtlety or nuance in handling what some folks might consider a rather complicated subject.