Home Again

Wiltse's new thriller is charged with the ominous effects that made The Fifth Angel and his other mysteries so successful. But the author also invests his characters with humanity and makes one care about their problems. After wiping out a terrorist gang, FBI agent Peter Ketter is sickened by violence and quits the Bureau. With his wife and adolescent son Michael, Ketter settles in his small Nebraska hometown. Michael records part of the events thereafter, dismayingly different from his father's peaceful dreams. Peter, always sure of himself as a good family man, if not the ""puritan'' his jeering brother Edward calls him, becomes the insatiable lover of Karen Maust, whose husband Frank has accumulated a fortune from mail-order porn. Burdened by his conscience and troubles involving Michael, Peter remains aloof from the efforts to find the murderer of two young women. When his boyhood friend is the next victim, however, the enraged ex-agent uses illegal tricks to trap the killer. Facing his adultery and law-breaking, Peter knows he may yet solve the riddle of himself as he has solved the crime. (June 23)