GREEN GIRLS

Madness, murder, money, betrayal, vengeance, obsession, and a smattering of erotic set-pieces in a push-button psychological thriller.

Jake Winter arrives home at an untimely moment and catches his wife with Price Ashworth, his ex-analyst—en flagrante. Well, not quite. But they were having this candlelit dinner, Jake subsequently explains to the authorities, “with good wine and oyster-minestrone soup.” What recourse, then, but to throw a radio at the head doctor’s head, since the heartbreaking truth is that Laura, Jake’s wife, makes oyster-minestrone only when she’s in love? So there’s Jake, jailed on a felony assault charge, though not for long. To the rescue—with bail money—comes young Alix Callahan. Who, Jake’s attorney asks, is this welcome though mysterious benefactor? Good question, and one Jake is hard-pressed to answer satisfactorily. Dimly, he recalls going to college with a woman of that name, but the University of New Hampshire was 15 years ago and they were never really friends. Nor is the lady herself exactly filled with information once she’s tracked down and confronted. She’s a fan, she says, of Berth, Jake’s book about the sleeping compartment of a train, a recondite enough work not previously notable for arousing passionate support. Jake leaves his meeting with Alix bemused. His meeting with July (née Juliette Whitestone), however, is far more unsettling—July, the stunning, unmitigatedly sexy, half-American, half-Kogi (Colombian) Indian, whose beauty is only skin-deep while evil permeates her every pore. Thanks to her, Jake is involved in a disastrous incident during which Alix falls from the Piscataqua Bridge (Maine), putting Jake under suspicion of being complicit in her murder. Wanton, willful July: wicked enough to make any man desperate for August.

Kimball’s strength has been in putting real people in untenable situations (Mouth to Mouth, 2000, etc.). Here, the people are cardboard, the situations unremarkable.