Strangers Among Us

Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police captures a young killer, but later, as he and Cassandra Mitchell are planning to celebrate Valentine's Day, another man with a secret and a gun ruins their evening

Although she opens with a forthright murder, Wright (Prized Possessions) eschews the whodunit and even the whydunit to explore dark subplots lacking simple answers. Karl Alberg, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police staff sergeant in the small village of Sechelt, B.C., detected tension in the Gardener family, but he didn't expect 14-year-old Eliot Gardener to murder his parents with a machete. Refusing to dismiss him as a "bad seed," Karl takes an interest in the boy, who refuses to talk to police or social workers at the youth shelter where he is confined. Similarly uncommunicative is Jack Coutts, who has been nursing a grudge against Karl since they were neighbors years ago but only now has turned up to follow Karl around the streets of Sechelt. Although Jack's presence makes Cassandra Mitchell, Karl's significant other, decidedly edgy, Karl explains only that the issue is personal, not work-related. While Jack and Karl circle each other like dogs doomed to fight if their eyes meet, Eliot makes friends with another troubled youth in the detention center?from which they soon escape. These two stories never converge as Wright opts for a juxtaposition of parallel psychologies (Eliot's and Jack's) rather than intersecting plots, holding this tale together less with suspense than with a relentlessly brooding tone.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Why would teenager Eliot Gardener suddenly take a machete to his family as they toiled alongside him on a Sechelt beach, killing his father and mother and seriously wounding his beloved eight-year-old sister Rosie? Wright, too cagey a pro to offer a quick answer (or even much hope for a slow one), instead pairs this riddle with another: Why did salesman Jack Coutts once beat up Sgt. Karl Alberg? For that matter, why has Coutts, mourning his own wife and daughter, drifted back to the coast of British Columbia packing a gun and evidently intending to use it to postpone Alberg's marriage to his live-in librarian, Cassandra Mitchell, to the indefinite future? Taking as her model Barbara Vine's retrospective studies of guilt, Wright plunges back into the history of Coutts's fey, troubled wife--even as Eliot, partnered by an amazingly resourceful little kid not much older than the sister he attacked, breaks out of the detention center he's been sent to without a clue where he's going or what he'll do. Despite the high body count and the promise of more action, the uncharacteristically languid story never really escapes the toils of the past--but that's exactly Wright's point, as she labors to trace the outlines of these strangers beneath the masks they've worn to each other for years. Not by a long shot the best of Alberg's dozen cases (Mother Love, 1995, etc.), but one of the most ruminative and touched with hope. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Wright, one of Canada's finest mystery writers, delivers a superb story that is both a riveting psychological puzzle and a compelling study of guilt and guile. She offers a smorgasbord of human experiences--dashed hopes, small disappointments, dramatic tragedies--that makes her characters and her story both realistic and disturbing. Quiet, well-behaved teenager Eliot Gardener goes berserk and murders his parents. Sent to a juvenile detention center near Vancouver, he teams up with a streetwise 10-year-old, and the two plot an escape. Enter Canadian policeman Karl Alberg, a friend of the Gardener family, who is consumed by guilt because he feels he should have foreseen the tragedy and prevented it. Now he believes it's his responsibility to find Eliot and try to discover what provoked the teenager's murderous rage. Wright is a masterful storyteller who slices off big chunks of life, seasons them with dark humor and tragic irony, and serves them up for readers to relish and digest. Her latest deserves a place in every mystery collection. Emily Melton

When a troubled teenager kills his parents, staff sergeant Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who knows the kid, feels partly responsible. Alberg's obsessive ruminations almost interrupt fiancee Cassandra's nuptial plans, as does the reappearance in town of another troubled party?a former neighbor who once attacked him for no apparent reason. Wright (Mother Love, LJ 9/1/95) builds tension that leads to further psychological rumblings, escape, and suicide. A good mixture of characterization and police procedure. For larger collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.