Bloodties

An ingenious plot fueled by skillful writing gives Murphy's second novel (after Nightshade dramatic clout. Kevin Matthews was three years old when he was kidnapped from the park next to his family's house in Boston. His mother Chris searched for him continuously until, pregnant and verging on a nervous breakdown, she was convinced by her husband, Neil, that their boy was dead. Fifteen years later, after Neil has suffered a stroke, Chris takes in a boarder, a college student named David Crane for whom she develops a strong, inexplicable attachment. David, on the run from New Hampshire where he believes he has killed the man who raised him, is also drawn to Chris. He fits easily into the household at first, but then tension builds between him and 13-year-old Erin; soon David begins to imagine that little dead Kevin is invading his personality. Neil, working again as county district attorney and embroiled in a child pornography case, discovers that the increasingly tense and unpredictable David is not a student at all. One night both David and Erin disappear. While David's true identity is never really a question, his emotional state and intentions toward Erin are in doubt until the very end. Murphy neatly directs her narrative to its satisfying resolution, an ending that serves to dissipate some of the story's intrinsic horror. (August 14)