by Andrew Klavan
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by Andrew Klavan
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Amazon.co.uk Review
A wife who's too good to be true usually isn't--and the cliché holds true in Klavan's engrossing little thriller Man and Wife. Psychiatrist Cal Bradley is married to Marie, an adoring and sensuous helpmate, and he's happier than he ever thought he'd be. In fact, he's surprisingly content to ignore the signs that something in her past is still troubling her deeply--until he sees his wife in the arms of a stranger. Then young Peter Blue, accused of battering his girlfriend and setting a church on fire, comes under Cal's care. When Peter discloses his relationship with the stranger Cal saw in the woods with his wife, Marie's past suddenly explodes into the present, threatening to turn Cal's world upside down. There's not a lot of subtlety here--the conclusion is practically handed to the reader on the first page, with its heavy foreshadowing. But the novel works anyway, due to Klavan's deft characterisation of Peter, a complex, spiritual adolescent who forces Cal to confront his own conscience and his conflict between love and duty. --Jane Adams
Review
For Cal Bradley, psychiatrist and locally respected pillar of the community, life is bliss. He's living his own American dream, the very picture of white, middle-class, small-town happiness. He's as deeply in love as ever with Marie, his attractive, adoring wife, and the proud father of three fine kids. It's what Cal wants. A life nothing like his own, unhappy childhood. Nothing like the tortured existence that led his beloved sister Mina to commit suicide. No doubts or uncertainties, deceit or despair. It's a life that he has made sacrifices for and that he is determined to preserve. Into this stable, satisfied world comes Peter Blue, a young teenage boy. Endowed with an astonishing charisma but nonetheless wildly unstable and insecure, Peter is facing prison on a charge of assault, arson and threatening behaviour unless Cal can convince the courts of his fragile mental health. Cal knows prison will destroy Peter and is determined to help him. But Peter is linked to darker forces, forces from the past that are about to be unleashed on Cal's perfect world and taint it forever. It is the compassion in Andrew Kavan's writing that makes this more than a cleverly written, tense thriller. The story begins slowly and thoughtfully, and deals so carefully with establishing the man in his place that one could be forgiven for thinking that it is not a thriller at all, but it quickly picks up pace and the reader, locked in sympathy with Cal, is drawn along too. Above all this is a story of the fragility of social, moral and emotional worlds, however firmly based they may seem, and of the tragedy of a man who loses the very thing that makes his life 'right'. (Kirkus UK)
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95% buy the item featured on this page: Man and Wife |
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5% buy Dynamite Road (Klavan, Andrew) |
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