New York Review of Books Review

MICHAEL KORYTA is a fearless stylist who has put his hand to ghost stories, historical novels, killer-thrillers, revenge tragedies, morality tales and detective stories. He's now swinging from the high wire with THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (Little, Brown, $26), a heart-thumping backwoods adventure that sends two creatively sadistic killers into Montana's Beartooth Mountains, where they spark a monster forest fire to flush out the only witness to their crimes: Jace Wilson, a 14-year-old boy. Jace was just trying to escape his reputation as class coward when he dived into a quarry near his Indiana home. But when he swam into a dead man - and spotted the killers flinging a second victim into the water - Jace knew he was going to die. Reborn with a new name, he finds himself among the "bad kids" in a grueling wilderness survival course, parked there when his parents couldn't be persuaded to put him in a traditional witness protection program. Jace's hunters, the Blackwell brothers, are heartless sociopaths whose professional detachment is etched in their unnervingly precise grammar and careful diction. ("The way they say things. Like they're alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they're lords over it.") There will be no mercy from that quarter. Koryta rigs his tripwire plot with all sorts of unpredictable characters and unforeseen events, including a "flint-and-steel" electrical storm that will make your hair stand on end. There are any number of hunting parties combing the burning woods for Jace, from the Black-well brothers to two determined women riding an injured horse. But sitting here, heart in mouth, it sure looks as if that raging forest fire will outrun them all. IS THERE ANYTHING more unnerving than the realization that you can't trust your own mother? Maybe the realization that you can't trust your father either. That's the killer premise Of THE FARM (Grand Central, $26), a psychological thriller by Tom Rob Smith that draws on the universal fear of losing a parent. The narrator of this split-focus story is a young man named Daniel who lives in London and hasn't been in close touch with his parents since they retired to a farm in rural Sweden. Then one day he gets a frantic phone call from his father, who tells him that his mother has had a psychotic break and is in an asylum. But before Daniel can head for Sweden, his mother arrives with a wild tale of being terrorized by his father and the rich owner of a neighboring farm. Smith's atmospheric narrative draws on fearsome local legends about trolls with "shrapnel teeth" and "bellies like boulders," but as Daniel discovers, the "iron nights" of winter in rural Sweden can drive a stranger a little crazy. IN SUSPENSE FICTION, walking into danger is usually women's work. Joseph Finder flips that convention in SUSPICION (Dutton, $27.95) when a writer named Danny Goodman, a widower who's going nowhere on a biography of Jay Gould, gets into hot water by accepting a $50,000 loan to keep his daughter, Abby, in her pricey private school. The loan comes from Tom Galvin, the indecently rich father of Abby's best friend, and soon after the check clears, two D.E.A. agents strong-arm Danny into spying on Galvin, who's reputedly acting as a financier for a Mexican drug cartel. Finder sets a stiff pace for the escalating crises that keep Danny both in thrall to his handlers and in a state of high anxiety. As he gets to know Galvin, and even considers him a friend, he finds himself wondering what, exactly, makes Galvin any different from a 19th-century robber baron like Jay Gould. SOME PEOPLE CAN'T get enough of Jack the Ripper, and for that clique there's Alex Grecian, who takes an obsessive interest in Saucy Jack in his historical potboilers. "He was deathless," we're told in THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP (Putnam, $26.95), in which a freakish jail break allows the monster to escape from his cell at Bridewell Prison and embark on another murderous rampage. Detective Inspector Walter Day and other members of Scotland Yard's elite Murder Squad are on hand for the blood bath, as is Dr. Bernard Kingsley, whose work in the new field of forensic science lent historical authenticity to the series's previous novels. Unfortunately, scientific investigation doesn't figure much in this narrative, which is firmly fixated on the savagery of Jack's deeds. SOMEONE IS WATCHING you, but no one is there. Charlotte Link plays on that primal fear in her psychological suspense story, THE WATCHER (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), when an attentive killer goes to work on single women so socially alienated that their bodies can lie undiscovered for days. "What they have in common is their loneliness," one of the Scotland Yard detectives remarks. More mystifying is what the victims have in common with Gillian Ward, who lives with a husband, a 12-year-old daughter and a black cat named Chuck. Unless it happens to be Samson Segal, the neighbor who's stalking the family because they reside in "the world he had always dreamed of." The cool precision of Link's narrative voice (translated from German by Stefan Tobler) makes it clear why this kind of adulation is so chilling.