INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

In this third installment of a series, a seasoned therapist gets involved in a college rape case.

Kraus (All God’s Children, 2014, etc.) takes her main character, an experienced therapist and mediator who’s worked for over 30 years in the small town of Kaw Valley, into the world of college “hookup culture” and the murky complications of campus rape allegations. Grace McDonald has been taking referrals from the Kaw Valley Rape Crisis Center. Her good friend Kaw Valley policewoman Patsy Tsosie is working a case concerning a young woman named Hannah, who claims she was raped at a party by a fraternity brother called Logan Whiteman. From Patsy, Grace learns the familiar barrage of grim statistics: 88 percent of women raped on campus don’t report it; 16 percent of college women will be sexually assaulted in some way; 26 percent of reports lead to an arrest; and only 20 percent of those result in prosecution (as the protagonist mordantly observes, “Roulette has better odds”). Grace’s latest referral, a young woman named Shelby Stewart, is haunted by her encounter with business major Hunter Payne, who secretly drugs women and pleasures himself—and takes copious photographs—while they’re unconscious. But whereas Hunter is guilty in a more straightforward sense, Logan’s case seems more complicated. As he doggedly insists, what happened between him and Hannah wasn’t rape, it was just a “hookup.” As one character exasperatedly asks, “Why use tax dollars to pay for DNA tests when the guy conceded at the first damn interview that, ‘Yeah, sure, we had sex. So what?’ ” In the face of institutional inertia and indifference, Grace and Hannah go outside the law in order to pursue justice. As in the previous volumes of the series, this novel is a complex, multifaceted, and refreshingly mature fictional examination of all sides of a social issue, in this case the complex dynamics of campus sexual assault. As Patsy observes at one point, “Juries do not convict clean-cut, well-mannered, white-boys for rape when there are no witnesses, no broken bones, no blood, no abduction, no serious signs of resistance or struggle.” Kraus does a scrupulous and realistic job of fleshing out all of her characters, including (although to a lesser extent) the tale’s villains, Hunter and Logan. And the story is at its most moving when dramatizing the complicated workings of shame, outrage, and insecurity that victims like Hannah feel. When walking around at school after her encounter with Logan, she repeats to herself: “I am safe. I’m in the middle of the campus in broad daylight. No one can hurt me.” But it doesn’t seem to help. The obtuseness of campus authorities, the bragging of Logan’s fellow frat dudes, and the slow seep of social shame (“Within twenty-four hours, Hannah was being treated as if she had cancer”) are conveyed with a smart refusal to rely on easy simplifications. Even the book’s most unlikely plot development, Hannah’s elaborate plan to seek “fantasy payback” against Logan, features enough believable details to convince readers—and make them wonder how many such schemes have actually happened.

A richly textured and absorbing fictional exploration of campus rape culture and its many victims.