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Alice Blanchard's new work is a page turner with more-than-ordinary reversals and undercuts awaiting the unwary reader. Unfortunately, Dear Reader, I cannot tell you about many of these because my doing so might spoil your fun. A BREATH AFTER DROWNING is a psychological thriller about a psychologist. But to the point.
Dramatis personae: Kate Wolfe, once a cutter, now a clinical psychologist; Kate's significant other, Dr. James Hill, psychologist, adult locked unit—they trade horror stories at night; Ira Lippencott, Kate's mentor, a psychologist who keeps Kate from going off the boards; Savannah, Kate's little sister, who was buried alive by a serial killer; Nikki McCormack, bipolar, suicidal teen whom Kate is trying to convince not to take her life; Kate's father, Bram Wolfe, distant, silent, absent; Prof. William Stigler, with whom Kate's mother had an affair, dapper, egotistical; Kate's mother, psychologically unstable, connoisseur of extramarital sex, she loaded her pockets with rocks and walked into a river; Nellie Ward, once Penelope Blackwood, niece to a Henry Blackwood, on death row for murdering little girls, and mother of Maddie Ward, a little girl, a cutter, abandoned at the psychological facility where Kate works; Palmer Dyson, intense, insistent police detective, ret'd, who worked the case of Kate's murdered sister and who insists that the real murderer is still loose.
When we first meet Kate, we shadow her as clinical psychologist at a Boston hospital. She is struggling to mentor Nikki McCormack, a bipolar, fragile, egotistical 15-year old. One night as she shares quality time with her significant other, also a psychologist, Kate gets The Bad Telephone Call—Nikki has hanged herself. Then, before she has fully resolved her self-blame for Nikki's death, another little girl shows up at the hospital, a cutter, apparently abandoned by both her mother and her father at the hospital. Seeking the child's mother, Kate visits a woman who shows every sign of having been battered and learns that she went to high school with this woman, Penelope Blackwood. When Penelope's uncle Henry Blackwood was arrested and tried for murdering little girls in the area, Penelope changed her name to Nellie to distance herself from her uncle's acts. It is this woman whom Kate finds cringing in her home, reluctant to talk about her daughter.
When Kate attends Nikki McCormack's funeral, something that she feels that she should do to avert any lawsuit her parents may choose to file against her as their daughter's caregiver, Kate is approached by a retired police detective, so insistent, so persistent: he says that he has additional information about her, Kate's sister's, murder. When Kate, under Palmer's—the police detective's—influence, is persuaded to be present at Henry Blackwood's capital punishment by injection, and also when information circulates that they have killed the wrong man, Kate is drawn in to investigate the killing of local children by someone who still seems to be at large.
The repartee between Kate and her significant other is funny and loving. They plan a trip, just the two of him, and James tries to find the gumption to give Kate a very special ring. The terrible plight of people with mental diseases intrudes upon their private moments and makes Kate wonder if she even deserves private moments, when there is suffering. Besides finding a killer, it is this, the tug between love and duty that gives this volume its human face.
If I question my Realism Eight-Ball, I turn one side up and the message opines, Too Labyrinthine for Reality. I think it means that no one could possibly treat suicidal girls, have had a mother commit suicide, and have had a sister murdered by a mass murderer, then become involved with the niece and grand-niece of said murderer. If I were to fault Blanchard's writing, it might be that this labyrinthine nature of her book reveals too much the book's artifice.
§ Dr. Cathy Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, where she teaches American literature and is a sometime fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, March 2018
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