A CHILD'S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME

Fourth-grade teacher Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her student, Lucien Marne. Complicating matters, the wife of Kate's lover has written a bestselling true crime book about the murder, two decades earlier, of a young woman, apparently killed by her lover's jealous wife. Kate begins to draw sinister parallels between her own illicit affair and the one in the book. Australian narrator Kate Hosking reads the novel with an effective but unsettling blend of innocence and erotic yearning, as field trips and t?ête-à-t?êtes take the young teacher through the Tasmanian countryside and old penal colonies. Equally unsettling are the fragments of another narrative, an analysis of the twenty-year-old murder as investigated by the animals of the forest. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/ JUL 04]