Reprisal - Softcover

Mitchell Smith writes deceptively quiet, outwardly civilized thrillers about people we can identify with--people whose lives are suddenly ripped apart. He's fascinated by the way his characters react to stress, by how much pressure they can absorb before they either break or change into another kind of person.

In Reprisal, Joanna Reed, a poet and professor, is sorely tested by various demons. She battles breast cancer, and then her husband Frank, an experienced sailor, drowns in the Atlantic Ocean. Joanna tries to work out her grief and pain as she has always done, by spelunking in dangerous caves. Meanwhile, her elderly father is burned to death in his cabin in the woods--another "accident."

We quickly find out that a strange young girl named Charis--the college roommate of Joanna's daughter--is connected to the deaths. Tough and endlessly resourceful, Charis wants to destroy Joanna's life as reprisal for a past grievance. It takes the equally smart but grief-slowed Joanna some time to realize what's happening, but Smith is so good at getting into her mind and soul that we can easily forgive this small lapse. He also rewards our patience with an ending that is both terrifying and sadly inevitable. --Dick Adler

A tense, low-key thriller that takes a poet and professor, strips everybody she loves away from her, and then watches to see what she'll do. Joanna Reed is a survivor of her parents' divorce, of the cancer that took her right breast, of a hundred perilous spelunking expeditions, and now of a shocking pair of accidents: her husband Frank's drowning off their summer place on Asconsett Island, and her father Louis Bernard's burning to death in his backwoods cabin. Only Joanna doesn't think they were accidents. Even before the news of the fire that claimed her father's life, she didn't believe that the first time Frank ever took off his life-jacket was also the first time he ever fell off a boat. But Asconsett chief constable Carl Early blows her off with a New Englander's brusque idea of sympathy, even when she goes back to him in a rage after her careful father dies because of his supposed carelessness. So Joanna, sunk in a grief that Smith (Sacrifice, 1997, etc.) renders with respect for each painful nuance, launches her own investigation and ends up in the middle of an ill-advised drug-smuggling plot that's rescued only because its participants turn out to be people as fragile and tentative as Joanna herself. Despite her chastening run-in with these not-so-bad guys, she's still ninety percent sure her men were murdered, and, as Smith has revealed from the opening scene, she's a hundred percent right. Both were killed by resourceful, manipulative Charis Langenberg, the summer college roommate of Joanna's daughter Rebecca. And Charis, a cool piece of work who's plotted both murders with cunning detachment, isn't done with Joanna yet. It's not until she strikes still closer to home that Smith weds his standard-issue thriller plot to the surprising texture he's shown all along. Instead of the usual fruits of the genrecreeping menace and empty surprisesSmith offers something rarer: a fine sense of the ambiguous intimacy between predator and prey. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.