The Edge of Things

With a fine use of suspense and deeply nuanced characters, Lyons (Camp Baseball) pushes the envelope of the literary thriller in his second novel, which concerns a serial killer in Seattle. When 40-year-old motorist Harris Duke picks up hitchhiker Robert Steen Roe, aka Roy Braden, he finds himself in the presence of a sociopath ""with a hint of the fanatic in his eyes"" who babbles about the ""brotherhood of man."" Traumatized as a child in an unspecified incident, Robert targets women exclusively as murder victims. When Duke learns that Gretchen Massie, the widowed traveler he picks up at a diner, has been gruesomely murdered after having been led into the woods by Robert, Duke becomes obsessed with finding out the truth. Though Lyons loosely bases his novel on a series of murders committed by the so-called Green River Killer in the Pacific Northwest, he wanders far from the facts to examine the relationship between the pursuer and the pursued. The stream-of-consciousness action shifts from childishly insecure and unpredictable Robert; to prosecutor Amy Snow and her on-again, off-again lover, Micah Brown; to volatile Duke. In the process, Lyons looks into troubling emotions, from lust to violence, that can motivate male behavior. Despite their great attraction for each other, for example, Amy has a tremendous physical fear of Micah that is eerily similar to the fear experienced by the women who become Robert's victims. Duke, also in his search for love, appears to be stalking the women he pursues almost as much as Robert does. Lyons handles the tangle of sexual relationships to frightening effect, though the extensive and graphic scenes of sexual violence may estrange some readers. (Jan.)