REVENGE

Obsessed by the accident that killed her father, a woman confides her misgivings to a famous novelist in this, Morris’s eighth work of fiction.

Andrea Geller is a painter and junior faculty member at Hartwood, a liberal arts college in upstate New York. Drifting uncertainly between two lovers (Charlie, single but unexciting, and Gil, married but passionate), Andrea doesn’t consider either relationship as important as discovering the truth about her father’s death. Simon Geller was a distinguished pediatric cardiologist on his second marriage. One foggy night he left the house on an errand, lost control of his car, and suffered a heart attack, but took two years to die. Andrea wants to know why her stepmother Elena, who supervised his medication, had let him drive off alone. And where was he going? Elena had inherited everything, and, though Andrea and brother Robby contested the will, the judge had ruled against them. For Andrea her father’s death is still an open wound. Enter Loretta Partlow, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and Andrea’s neighbor. The two become friendly. Andrea is hoping the novelist will use her version of events (deliberate overmedication to cause a death) in a story that will scare the daylights out of her stepmother, a big Partlow fan. Whoa! Didn’t Andrea know never to trust a writer, especially a “gorgon” like Loretta with her “ferret eyes”? Couldn’t she have listened to her own “small voice” telling her to desist? Regardless, Andrea confides in her neighbor, though initially concealing her own difficulties with her father. But Loretta will root those out and use them to devastating effect in the novel (which gets a rave from Kirkus). But before we reach that all too predictable climax, there’s much genteel chitchat between the spider and the fly, all quite boring. Evidently, Partlow is one of those writers who saves her dazzle for the printed word.

Morris’s latest is as anemic as her previous (Acts of God, 2000).