THE BEST REVENGE

White injects Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory into the wild and wooly saga of a convicted killer released from Death Row to the even more dangerous world outside.

Thirteen years ago, medical student Tom Clone, traumatized even as a child by his manic-depressive mother’s suicidal throat-cutting, tried to stop Ivy Campbell when she broke up with him. Tried too hard, according to a jury of his peers, who found Tom guilty of murder. Now Kelda James, an FBI agent who made her reputation by rescuing little Rosa Alija from a kidnapper Kelda shot dead, has acted on a telephone tip to find the long-missing knife that slit Ivy’s throat, and DNA analysis establishes that Ivy’s blood is on it and Tom’s isn’t. With the least possible fanfare, Tom’s released from prison, and Kelda’s waiting outside to buy him breakfast at a posh Denver hotel and drive him back to his grandfather’s house—if the pair of menacing Park County detectives who investigated Ivy’s murder and aren’t ready to accept Tom’s exoneration don’t stop her by force. Kelda even hooks Tom up with her own psychotherapist, Dr. Gregory (The Program, 2002, etc.), who makes scant progress with Tom but is soon connecting Kelda’s psychosomatic leg pains to her school friend Joan Winslett’s accidental death in Hawaii just a few weeks after Ivy’s murder. A patient analyst might eventually have sorted out all the resulting suspicions, neuroses, and betrayals, but instead of giving his unlikely detective a fair chance, White opts for the action route via a second kidnapping, a high-country shoot-’em-up, and a denouement that leaves one forlorn participant protesting, “This [is] the goofiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

White handles his suspenseful set-pieces with all his accustomed authority, but the case he’s lavished them on is a farrago of coincidences, absurdities, and pitifully shadowy and unmotivated conspirators from beginning to end.