HEART-SIDE UP

Attacked in her Rhode Island classroom by a knife-wielding student, Zoe Muir finds her psychological wounds are harder to heal than the cuts on her body. At the start of this bittersweet novel of recovery, Zoe's young psychiatrist, Zeke Polushka, helps her with Xanax and good-natured humor, though her dependence on the former erases any appreciation for the latter. In the course of one of their sessions, Zeke suggests that the pain and suffering inflicted by the slasher opened up wounds caused by the loss of her first love, Dayton Reed, so she tracks down Dayton, who has joined a small and idiosyncratic monastery in rural Vermont. Eager to escape her increasingly claustrophobic life, Zoe uses her settlement money to buy a cottage near Dayton's retreat, with no electricity or running water, on a huge plot of land. The locals treat her with a mixture of distrust, disdain and outright disgust. Only politician Hal Westerbrook and constable Spark Everett show genuine interest in Zoe, though their motives are unclear. Zoe begins working through her rocky past and finds her spirits lifted when Spark gives her a dog to keep her company. But when strange and scary things begin happening to Zoe once more, she questions whether she can ever trust anyone again. Dimmick (In the Presence of Horses) whips up a storm of paranoia and suspicion—mostly in the head of the tormented heroine—as her novel proceeds to a teasing conclusion. (May)