THE INTERROGATION

Englishtown, USA, 1952. Two weeks after Cathy Lake, eight, was found strangled in the park where she played every day, the cops are down to their last twelve hours before they have to turn loose their suspect, a homeless fellow whom witnesses place at the scene and whose only defense is that he was trying to protect the little girl from a threatening man nobody else ever saw. So Chief of Detectives Thomas Burke turns veteran Detectives Norman Cohen and Jack Pierce loose on Albert Jay Smalls, hoping that this last marathon interrogation will turn up a lead all the others missed. Pierce is fighting his own demons—he can’t forget the man who murdered his own eight-year-old daughter Debra four years ago, beat the rap, and then killed himself—and so is Burke, whose son, a drug addict and petty thief, lies on his deathbed. As Cohen and Pierce race against the clock to shake loose a clue, Smalls—a sad, self-pitying midge who has little to say for himself except that he never killed anybody—doesn’t budge an inch. But a chance remark gives his interlocutors an entree into his past, where they’ll find violence, tenderness, unspeakable evil, and the churning torment of a lost soul a little too close to them for comfort before the final sickening surprise.

The irresistible premise guarantees a story that’s slicker and faster-moving than The Chatham School Affair (1997) and Instruments of Night (1998)—and if it doesn’t achieve quite the psychological intensity of Cook’s last pair of novels, well, what does?