The Incident

May 1, 2016
A young woman who survived a vicious sexual assault when she was still in high school thinks she's finally escaped her troubled past. She hasn't. Now that she's graduated summa cum laude from college, Victoria Myers has come back to Sandburg, New York, where everybody knows everybody and everybody knows what happened to her six years ago. On her way home from a lakeside party, she was attacked and raped by at least two men she was unable to identify. Lt. Patty Marcus, of the New York State Police, thought Victoria so little help that she barely gave her the time of day; Dr. Thornton, her psychologist, could aid her only so much; and her parents, Lester and professor Helen Myers, had to face neighbors who clearly regarded their beloved daughter as damaged goods, someone whose assailants, she reflects mournfully, "didn't simply steal my virginity....They stole my identity, my sense of self." Now, however, Victoria's basking in the glow of Bart Stonefield, the high school crush who dropped out of college and went to work at his father's car dealership. All of a sudden Victoria's Prince Charming seems to have discovered how beautiful and intelligent and generally wonderful she is. He takes her to dinner at the town's premier restaurant, showers her with compliments, pledges his undying love, and surprises her with an engagement ring. As her parents struggle to cope with their daughter's dazzling good fortune, even Victoria wonders if there's a catch. Of course there is, and only readers whose eyes are clouded by the latest megadose of purple prose from Neiderman (Lost in His Eyes, 2015, etc.) will fail to see it long ahead of his heroine. A slender premise plumped out gracefully but gratuitously to novel length.

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July 1, 2016
The incident of the title is rarely referred to by Victoria's family, so mired are they by the strict moral code and small-town class distinctions of the late 1950s and early '60s. Six years ago, Victoria, then a teenager, was brutally beaten and raped by unknown assailants and further abused by the suspicious scrutiny of the denizens of her Catskills resort town. She had been on the verge of becoming sophisticated, confident before she was so violently, abruptly sent to the back of the line. She returns after college, and her high-school crush, Bart, asks her out, a situation years of therapy haven't prepared her for, but with a kiss, for her, what had been a dream lost, was found. Neiderman (Lost in His Eyes, 2015) writes with flowing, almost limpid prose, looping back in time to that night when teens gathered and necked in convertibles. The assailants, presumably summer people, were never caught. And Bart carries a dark secret. Is he connected to the violence still haunting Victoria? Neiderman presents an irresistible novel of romantic suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)