COMPULSION

The present is wounded by the past in an expertly judged psychological thriller.

Still reeling from his last case (Projection, 1999), likable forensic psychologist Frank Clevenger wants to shake the demons of his past: booze, drugs, women, and criminal investigations, all compulsions stemming from his scarred childhood. But old friend North Anderson, now chief of police in Nantucket, seeks Clevenger’s insights into a murder: Someone has asphyxiated a five-month-old baby by filling her trachea and nasal passages with window caulking. Clevenger takes on the case, which stirs memories of the physical and psychological abuse he himself suffered at his father’s hands. He finds the infant’s stepbrother Billy particularly compelling—the teenager’s back bears the marks of his father’s repeated lashings. And Billy’s insecure brother Garret also arouses his angst over a guilt-ridden young patient who committed suicide. Billy and Garret’s brutish father, billionaire Darwin Bishop, insists a violent Billy murdered the baby. As the evidence suggests, though, Clevenger senses Bishop is the killer. All the while, he grows irresistibly attracted to Bishop’s second wife Julia, the victim of Bishop’s philandering and physical violence. As he wonders whether love for Julia clouds his work on the case, someone tries to murder the infant’s surviving twin sister. Bishop loses it, literally striking out at Julia in an attack that turns the case around and lands him behind bars, clearly headed toward conviction for his daughter’s murder. Clevenger, Julia, and the boys seek a sunny recovery in Nantucket, but they don’t quite find it. In a surprise-filled coda, Clevenger digs into family history and uncovers a dark secret revealing that someone else, not Bishop, is the killer. Case dismissed? Perhaps from court, but not from the minds of its psychological victims, as a perceptive Ablow makes clear through Clevenger’s sharp observations.

Past remains both prologue and villain in a solid, satisfying case.