UNBECOMING

The epilogue to Scherm's debut novel would have made a terrific short story, or a film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

The novel that precedes it is infinitely less interesting, primarily because of problems with pacing. The story of Grace, a nice Southern girl who ends up planning an art theft from the local heritage house with the help of her too-loyal boyfriend, Riley, and his friends, is told in flashback sections that take too long to get to the point. The point is, of course, the heist, and though Scherm's attention to detail is impressive—outlining just where Grace got the skills (apprenticing for an appraiser in New York City) and the cunning to pull off such a bold maneuver—the result is a novel that feels lopsided. All the buildup is meant to make us care more about Grace's fate and the relationships among the characters, but it bogs the story down. When attempting to write in the vein of Hitchcock and Highsmith, authors should remember these masters' precise economy of style. This novel is unsuccessful precisely because it tries to make the mundane part of the action, though it just acts as a counterweight to what should be the excitement of crime. Family lives, childhoods, petty failures and their associated feelings are supposed to give the novel heft, but they really just distract from the elements that are the most exciting, to both Scherm (her writing is best when Grace is at her most wicked) and the reader.

More thrills and less ponderous thinking about thrills would have made this an impressive first novel. Instead, it's a decidedly mixed bag, taking too long to gather the momentum it needs to succeed as crime fiction and not quite making the cut as satisfying literary fiction, either.