Long Drive Home

February 28, 2011
Allison follows What You Have Left with a tight drama, part psychological thriller, part tragedy. Glen is an accountant living in New Jersey with his successful wife, Liz, and their six-year-old daughter, Sara. On an ordinary drive home from school, a series of mundane decisions grow increasingly dire and culminate in a car accident that sets road-raging Glen onto a path of deception and self-destruction. The novel is told from Glen's perspective, in part through a confessional letter written to Sara, an obvious but nonetheless effective tension builder. It's a slow burn as guilt chips away at Glen's sanity and his marriage crumbles, his impotent angst finds an unlikely outlet, and he comes under ever more scrutiny by a strangely motivated detective. Allison's triumph is the skillful rendering of Glen's transformation as a basically good guy whose fatal flaw leads him to a cataclysmically stupid decision. And while other characters fare less well—the cop on Glen's tail is straight out of an airport thriller, and Liz isn't given the chance to break through her mercenary and fundamentally unpleasant mold—Allison's effortless prose and playful genre mixing showcase a burgeoning talent.

Written as a confessional by a father to his 8-year-old daughter about his having contributed to a teen's death in a car accident, this book--touted as a psychological thriller--is anything but. It's a morose story featuring a melancholy performance by a droning Tony Ward. The father, Glen, is pursued by a relentless cop who sometimes reminds one of Columbo--without the sense of humor. One expects the trap to spring. Instead, Glen's marriage falls apart, his daughter becomes distant, and the prospect of another's culpability in the teen's death ends in midair. Ward's reading is clear and easy to follow, but inevitably he adds to the sense of the listener's disappointment in the story. A thriller this is not. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine