Reprisal

Quaint New England beaches and disorientingly vast, scary caves are among the effective settings used by Smith (Sacrifice) in this absorbing tale of memory, murder and long-postponed revenge. Smith's sixth novel offers much suspense but little mystery, since the villain is known from the outset: she's Charis Langenberg, sexually abused at age six, who has grown up to be, at 20-something, a full-time graduate student and sociopath. Charis has staged, only days apart, the ""accidental"" deaths on Asconsett Island of the father and grandfather of Rebecca Reed, her teenage summer-school roommate. Joanna Reed, the novel's heroine, is Rebecca's mom and also a poet. When she arrives at Asconsett Island to grieve, she has a hard time believing the deaths were accidents. How could her husband, a skilled seaman, have drowned? Could her elderly, obsessively cautious father have died accidentally in a cabin fire? After much suspicion and several flashbacks, Rebecca herself ""falls"" off a dormitory roof. When her death is ruled a suicide, Joanna suffers a minor breakdown and Charis returns to Asconsett to help her recover. Will Joanna figure out who is behind the deaths, and why? Smith's prose prowess and skill with psychology and landscape offset his sometimes jerky plotting. His credibly flawed, offbeat characters and vivid descriptions--particularly of the underground caverns that Joanna, an avid spelunker, explores--will keep readers deeply involved. But Joanna's incessant introspection can be wearying. Her understanding of what's really going on, when it finally arrives, seems forced and sudden, marring what would otherwise be the gripping underground climax to a novel that, while not Mitchell's best (that's probably Stone City), is a reliable page-turner. (May)