THE WOODS

I suppose there could be a better reader of this tense, complex, thoroughly entertaining novel than Scott Brick, but it's hard to see how. Let's see, he mispronounces Wilkes Barre (the final "e" is long, not silent), and maybe he overplays the emotion in the scene in which Paul's uncle, a former KGB spy, reveals that the body just found in the woods is not Paul's sister, it's . . . but it would be a shame to spoil a single twist of this double-helix plot. The story's first-person narrator, Paul Copeland, prosecutor of Essex County, New Jersey, is trying a rape case, the defendants' fathers are blackmailing him, and a boy supposedly murdered 20 years ago with Paul's sister turns up mature and freshly dead. Unturnoffable. B.G. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/ SEP 07]