Swimming in the Dark

This absorbing psychological thriller from New Zealand author Richardson (Cross Fingers) explores four female characters’ emotional responses to personal and societal abuse. Serena Freeman, a bright 15-year-old high school student who adores words, comes from a highly dysfunctional family. When a brutal cop targets her as his sexual prey in her small New Zealand town, no one intervenes. Ilse Klein, Serena’s teacher, who escaped with her mother, Gerda, from East Germany in the early 1980s, offers Serena sympathy. After Ilse finds Serena on a river bank moaning in labor one night, Ilse leads the girl to her house, where she and Gerda deliver the baby. Serena and the baby live with these warm and loving women—until the police come knocking at the door. Despite a superfluous secondary plot involving Ilse’s affair with Anya, a childhood friend from Leipzig, the main story line honors the lonely and slighted victims of society with what German poet Heinrich Heine called “pain dipped in honey.” (Mar.)