Reprisal [Paperback]

Joining her family at Asconsett Island, Massachusetts, Joanna Reed, a noted poet, looks forward to the vacation. However, her idyllic summer abruptly ends when her spouse dies in an apparent drowning accident. Joanna cannot accept that her husband, a professional sailor who always used a life jacket, did not have one on him when he drowned. Her father soon dies in a fire. She argues with the local sheriff that both so-called accidents seem suspicious, but he figures she is just grieving.

A summer school roommate of Joanna's daughter, Charis Langenberg enters the distraught woman's life as a compassionate friend. However, unbeknownst to Joanna (but not to readers), Charis has killed the two men. When Joanna's daughter dies next from a roof top fall ruled a suicide, a mentally collapsed Joanna knows she must uncover the malevolent spirit destroying her family one person at a time.

REPRISAL is a well-written mystery that leaves readers wondering about the connection between the killer and her ultimate victim. The audience knows from the start that Charis is the killer, but Mitchell Smith hooks his fans by getting them to realize how cool and smooth the sociopath Charis is in her endeavor to get inside Joanna's life. Mr. Smith delicately provides glimpses into the deteriorating mind of Joanna as one tragedy after another is officially written off as an accident or suicide. Though the drug scene subplot seems to never reunite with the main plot, no one will doubt that this is a worthy thriller along the lines of Hitchcock's Frenzy.

Harriet Klausner

For one thing, while it's supposed to be a suspense novel, there was, strangely, no suspense. It wasn't that I guessed the ending so much as I didn't care. The plot involves a main character, Joanna Reed, who writes poetry and teaches at a small liberal arts college in New England. At the beginning of the book her husband is killed. We know he's been murdered because it's narrated for us, and we know how the killer did the deed. The killer is a young woman named Charis, and though we know how she did it, we're not supposed to know why. The problem is that there are only a few possibilites as to motive, and one becomes likely and obvious rather quickly. Charis moves on to kill the remainder of Joanna's family, one by one, and then tries to befriend her. This goes on for the best part of 400 pages.

Unfortunately, there was nothing to make the story worthwhile. The characters are somewhat interesting, but the suspense is robbed from the story. One side plot has Joanna (the widow) becoming convinced that fishermen must have killed her husband because he saw them smuggling marijuana. This is interesting, except there's not much suspense---we know they didn't kill him, and we know they won't kill her (because the book's about halfway over at that point, can't have a book without a main character). As a result, it winds up being a pointless plot device that goes nowhere.

I can't recommend this book, and Smith goes on the list of "maybes" for now.