Safer

December 15, 2008
In this unsettling thriller from Barry Award–winner Doolittle (The Cleanup
), Boston transplants Paul Callaway and his wife, Sara, scare off a violent intruder their first night in their new home in Clark Falls, Iowa, where Paul has taken up a post as an English professor at the local university. As a result of this incident, the Callaways meet members of their tight-knit community, including ex-cop Roger Mallory, the neighborhood's unofficial protector. Though Paul is initially welcomed into Roger's circle of friends, Paul becomes suspicious when he discovers Roger is conducting secret surveillance of the neighborhood. Tensions mount between the two men, coming to a head after Paul is arrested for child pornography, a charge he's sure Roger helped concoct. Desperate to clear his name, Paul begins his own investigation into Roger's past. Despite Doolittle's admirably complex plot and empathetic hero, readers may question just how many skeletons a single small town can have in its closets.

January 1, 2009
Married professors Paul and Sara Callaway move from Boston to a small city in western Iowa so that Sara can accept a deans position. On their first night in their beautiful home on a leafy cul de sac, Paul returns from an errand to find Sara being assaulted by a stranger, thus beginning the Callaways nightmare on Sycamore Court. By semesters end, Paul is jailed for sexual exploitation of a 13-year-old girl, and he knows that his neighbor, Roger Mallory, a retired police officer and community pillar, is determined to destroy his and Saras lives. Safer has everything it needs to achieve commercial success, complete with movie option. The plot is slick and inventive. The author is skilled at ratcheting up readers foreboding, sympathy, and fear, creating the deep need to see how things turn out. The primary charactersPaul, Sara, Roger, Pauls attorney, and an ambitious TV journalistare vividly rendered, andlesser characters are well sketched with a sentence or two. And looming over everything is the specter of the Heartlands dark side.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)