PRIZED POSSESSIONS

Given a week's compassionate leave he doesn't need after his newly widowed mother briskly announces plans to get on with her own life, Sechelt (British Columbia) Mountie Karl Alberg (Fall from Grace, etc.) agrees to take the time to track down Charlie O'Brea—a vanished insurance executive who, he discovers, has been spending a year planning his escape from his marriage to his obsessively devoted wife Emma (``I was her career''). Meanwhile, down the Vancouver coast, gawky delivery boy Eddie Addison moves from awkwardly insulting Melanie Franklin to attempting an apology, and then to plotting revenge—a revenge he'll have to cover up by following Melanie's roommates up to Sechelt. The stories of grief-maddened Emma and flipped-out Eddie seem to have no connection (Alberg doesn't even know Eddie exists) until they lurch together with a final, sickening jolt. Though she doesn't share Ruth Rendell's command of narrative momentum—events here seem to swim by in agonized slow motion—Wright is fully her equal in psychological studies of compulsion, and this is one of her finest.