The Waters & the Wild

January 29, 2018
When artist Jessica Burke dies of an apparent overdose in her New York City apartment, her psychoanalyst, Daniel Abend, the protagonist of Oberlin professor Harrison’s poignant but ponderous debut, is shocked; he thought she’d turned her life around. Daniel manages to push the matter from his mind—until three years later, when he receives an anonymous package containing proof that Jessica was murdered. He destroys the evidence to avoid becoming involved, but then his 18-year-old daughter, Clementine, goes missing. His mailbox fills with menacing messages suggesting that the sender not only knows Clementine’s whereabouts but also possesses information about Daniel’s past indiscretions and the death of Clementine’s mother. Daniel knows that he must atone for his sins, but how far will he go in order to save his child? After a strong start, the story loses steam. Although the central mystery intrigues, its convoluted denouement frustrates, and Harrison’s fondness for florid prose and philosophical asides slows the pace while obscuring the plot. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

February 1, 2018

Daniel Abend, a psychoanalyst and single father living in New York City, pens a confession to a priest he barely knows about an affair years earlier with a woman in Paris, the mother, we are led to believe, of his teenage daughter Clementine. Multiple suicides have begun to trouble the doctor, fears that increase when Clementine, who has begun to ferret out the truth of her past, disappears just as an unknown nemesis threatens vengeance against the family. When enigmatic photos and letters arrive in the mail, Daniel is led via a series of disturbing revelations to an unimaginable conclusion. VERDICT Harrison's debut is more lyrical effusion than taut psychological thriller--poetical self-analysis marked by verbal repetition, endless questions, lengthy rumination, and similes that are sometimes far-fetched ("The road had sought me out, I thought, like a penetrator cable hoisting a downed pilot up through jungle canopy."). Still, patient readers who favor literary mysteries, along the lines of Carol Goodman's The Lake of Dead Languages, will enjoy the effusive language and the plot's tightening web. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Ron Terpening, formerly of Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

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March 1, 2018
As elegiac and plaintive as if came from the quill of Edgar Allan Poe himself, Harrison's novel is carefully constructed around Poe's favorite theme, the death of a beautiful woman. Daniel Abend is a successful Upper West Side psychoanalyst and the perplexed single parent of a teenager daughter. His life begins to unravel when he receives disturbing clues in the mail implying that one of his patients, believed to have committed suicide, may have been murdered. Then, when his daughter disappears a few days later, he is forced to confront the tangled mess he made as a young man living in Paris?a mess that left debts to be paid and accounts to be settled, perhaps with his own life, or even his daughter's. There is a striking psychological intensity to Harrison's fiction debut, which unfolds in the form of a written confession to a priest in which repetitive lines from a Yeats poem, The Stolen Child, help generate the story's ominous tone. Despite a twenty-first-century setting, this will satisfy fans of historical-fiction authors Louis Bayard and Matthew Pearl.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)