THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES

Bayer returns from his pseudonymous sabbatical as David Hunt (The Magician’s Tale, 1997, etc.) to spin a dizzyingly complex tale of long-unsolved felony.

Forensic sketch artist David Weiss thinks he’s come home to the mythical midwestern city of Calista to draw pictures of the leading personalities in a closed-to-cameras murder case and fall into bed with eager CNN reporter Pam Wells. Actually, as he swiftly realizes, he’s avid to return to an unsolved mystery that’s obsessed him since childhood: the kidnapping 26 years ago of little Belle Fulraine, whose complicit au pair was found beheaded soon afterward, and the brutal shotgun murders the following year, after Belle’s dazed parents divorced, of Barbara Fulraine and her latest lover, corn-fed high-school French teacher Tom Jessup. David has good reason to be entranced by the case: Belle’s brothers, Mark and Robin, were schoolmates of his; Jessup was his teacher; and Barbara was one of the last patients his psychiatrist father, Dr. Thomas Rubin, treated before his own suicide a few months later. Although Barbara had feared the jealousy of another lover, mobbed-up club owner Jack Cody, the police had never made an arrest in the case, and in the quarter-century since, most of the leads, from Cody to legendary gossip columnist Waldo Channing to Barbara’s ex-husband Andrew Fulraine, have passed on. But its tormented personalities still live in the diary Barbara kept until the day of her death and the extensive case notes David’s father kept on his seductive, enigmatic patient—and especially on her recurring dream of being pursued by a mounted posse that invariably ends when their horses, and her own, break into pieces.

Bayer (Mirror Maze, 1994, etc.) turns the case into something ambitious and penetrating, but also overlong, overwrought, and overlaid with borrowings from sources as different as Vera Caspary’s classic noir Laura and Freud’s classic case study of the Wolf Man.