AN HOUR TO KILL

Debut procedural with a psychoanalytic mess to unscramble.

Yapalater hoped to detail the Jung/Sabina Spielrein affair, back when analysts administering sex to relieve female hysteria was not uncommon, but research pushed her into today’s patient/analyst hanky-panky. And a freaky bunch we have. The story—a duel of cops and shrinks—begins one winter in Central Park when CP precinct’s Detective James Gurson and his black backup fellow officer, Didi Kane (worthy of a pinup), find themselves investigating both a burned body found in the upper park known as the Brambles and a seeming suicide-by-asphyxiation in a vastly expensive gull-wing Mercedes buried at night in park snow. The burned body belongs to Charlene Leone, Kane’s former lover and partner, an officer tossed off the force for drug use. The suicide is Dr. Orrin Gretz, who turns out to have a history that brings him up before the analysts’ board, which may take away his license. Gurson himself is a second-generation cop whose father (at 39) gassed himself in his garage when dismissed for having killed a youngster with a play gun. Thirteen- year-old James discovered his dad at his last breath, the car motor still running. The ADA who got the elder Gurson canned was Tucker Norville, now wealthy and married to Theodora Weil, an analyst near 40 and a park jogger. Also on hand: Isaac Collier, who years ago had been Gretz’s analyst and privy to a case in which Gretz may have impregnated a 14-year-old patient. The burned body echoes a burned body from a year past—with face and fingers of both bodies disfigured by acid. Gurson, a psychology major, has the smarts with which to analyze a whole snake pit of therapists and the reader will love him for it, although the final pages, drowning with analysis, would have gained from dark gaps.

Yapalater’s tight style and crunchy dialogue often delete nouns, verbs, or definite articles—to brave effect. A winning first effort.