The Wrong Man

Starred review from July 31, 2006
Bestseller Katzenbach (The Traveler
) manages the impressive feat of taking a thriller cliché and using it as the basis for a powerful and complex story. The one-night stand that Ashley Freeman, a Boston art history grad student, has with Michael O'Connell, a determined psychopath, leads to dire consequences. O'Connell quickly moves to obsessively control every aspect of Ashley's life, coupling a relentless will with ingenuity and computer skills that soon ensnare Ashley's loved ones as they seek to protect her from him. When their feeble attempts to buy or scare off O'Connell fail, Ashley's divorced parents, as well as her mother's lesbian partner, embark on a convoluted but ingenious plot of their own. The author deftly shifts perspective among his central characters, raising this page-turner above the run-of-the-mill by making all of them emotionally credible.

September 1, 2006
Ashley Freeman is a promising art-history student passionate about every aspect of her life. One night, the twentysomething Bostonian meets Michael O'Connell, a handsome, dark-haired stranger whom she readily forgets after a single steamy session between the sheets. But Mike, a street-smart psychopath who stalks women for sport, has no intention of letting Ashley go. He watches her every move from the shadows and sends her countless e-mails professing his love. Ashley's family and friends shrug it off as a crush, until O'Connell, an ingenious computer hacker, reveals the damage he can do: he sabotages the reputation of Ashley's professor father with a stinging accusation of plagiarism and nearly gets her mother, a lawyer, disbarred. Bribes and threats do nothing to deter him, and when a private investigator assigned to the case turns up dead, the Freeman family takes extreme measures to quash O'Connell's relentless pursuit. Although his ending is a bit too contrived, the best-selling Katzenbach (" The Madman's Tale," 2004) keeps the pages turning in this unsettling tale of obsessive love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)