The Usual Thrills and Unusually Fine Prose

Roger Cullingwood, one of the villains in Peter Abrahams’ ninth suspense novel, is a “throwback.” He believes in aristocracy, both inherited and earned. He has a mansion on Boston’s Beacon Hill, a summa cum laude degree from Harvard and an IQ of 181. He knows that “the proper place to leave a napkin when away from the table was to the left of the forks, folded in half. . . . Only a boor would leave it on his chair.” So why doesn’t the world defer to him as it should?

Roger has lost his job as a securities analyst and can’t get another, for reasons that are mysterious to him but clear to us: He lacks the normal complement of human feelings, except for jealousy and pride. When his wife, Francie, grows distant, he believes that their marriage can be “fixed” simply by keener analysis, better role-playing, on his part. When he discovers that she is having an affair with Ned Demarco, a radio psychologist, he thinks: “If this were Sicily, or Iran, countless other places, he could . . . kill her with impunity.”

But this is America, and Roger doesn’t want to get caught. So he conceives--as an act of intellectual arrogance, glorying in the workings of his own mind--a plan for the perfect murder. He will arrange for a paroled killer, Whitey Truax, to encounter Francie at a cottage in the New Hampshire woods. The circumstances will so closely resemble those of Whitey’s previous crime that he will react as if programmed. Then Roger will happen along, kill Whitey to “avenge” his wife and accept everyone’s sympathy.

Whitey is a throwback on a different evolutionary scale: a psychopath of the sort crime novels have made us familiar with. He doesn’t think so much as secrete at random from his various glands. Yet he senses that Roger is condescending to him and using him. And, as Tolstoy noted, in any contest of cunning, the stupider person wins. It’s no surprise that Roger’s plan should go subtly awry; what does shock us is how radically, totally, it implodes.

Shock is available to us because Abrahams (“The Fan,” “Lights Out”) has written more than a crime story here. His prose is elegant by any literary standard, and the other characters in “A Perfect Crime,” the nonvillains, whose flaws lie within the ordinary human range, are engaging and fully rounded, especially the women.

Francie, an art expert who buys paintings for foundations, is so enamored of Ned’s good looks and touchy-feely qualities that at first she is blind to his ambition--his talk show is on the verge of syndication--and to the pain their affair might cause his wife and teenage daughter. She is delighted to find a new tennis partner, Anne Franklin, unaware that this gentle, shy woman--a frustrated artist--is the very person she has wronged.

“A Perfect Crime,” typical of its genre in this respect, is full of such coincidences. Roger stumbles across Whitey’s name in an Internet chat room, and it’s all too handy that Whitey’s previous victim looked a lot like Francie. The previous victim’s husband, Joe Savard, is now both a small-town police chief who can track down Whitey and a chain saw sculptor who can appeal to Francie romantically. Anne suspects Ned of having an affair with a woman other than Francie--an executive for the network he is courting--and Francie sees that suspicion as aimed at herself.

In most suspense novels, we accept these stretchings of probability as the price we must pay for thrills. (Whitey does his bloody work with small cutting tools; Roger favors carbon monoxide but, in a pinch, isn’t averse to wielding an ax.) In this novel, we hardly notice, because Abrahams grips us so closely, line by line, making everything hyper-real--a doubles tennis match, Whitey’s halfway house in Florida, Roger’s computer noodling, an awkward dinner attended by Ned, Anne and the Cullingwoods, a near-fatal plunge through river ice.

Only when “A Perfect Crime” is over do we see how Abrahams, a plotter even more skilled than Roger, has manipulated us. We don’t mind too much, because in this case the conventions of the genre have packaged not only the expected thrills but that always unexpected bonus: good writing.