Sex Crimes

A successful but lonely professional woman casually beds an alluring but inappropriate man, only to find the relationship--and her emotions--spinning rapidly out of control. This is a familiar literary scenario, thanks to a spate of recent novels such as Two Girls Fat and Thin, Blood Song and In the Cut. Shute's second novel (after Life Size) doesn't stray far from the confines of the template, but it manages to pack a full-bodied punch nonetheless. With almost agonized intimacy, the narrative charts the 10-month relationship between Christine Chandler, an accomplished 38-year-old Boston immigration lawyer, and Scott DeSalvo, an intense, unstable photographer/musician more than a decade her junior, who is not only extremely sexy but also living with another woman. The affair begins when Christine drunkenly beds Scott after a New Year's Eve party. From there it unspools, against Christine's better judgment, in a series of passionate and increasingly volatile encounters, culminating in an act of barbaric cruelty--or is it self-defense?--by Christine that she herself is helpless to understand or justify. ""My mind went down without a struggle, into the whirlpool, into the dark,"" she recalls of the affair, ""my senses found black space and shattered like a meteor shower."" Although Shute's plot and prose can slide into melodrama, her portrait of the driven Christine unraveling under the pressure of her long-suppressed craving for intimacy is genuinely harrowing. It's also grim and claustrophobic, with no respite offered. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections; optioned by Jaffee, Bronstein for a TV movie. (Nov.)