When the Neighborhood Watch Goes Bad

SAFER

By Sean Doolittle

Delacorte. 334 pp. $24

A good thriller need not wallow in violence and murder. That was demonstrated as long ago as 1862, when Wilkie Collins published "No Name," the second of his three great pioneering novels of suspense (the other two are "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone"). The title refers to the bastardy of its heroine, Magdalen Vanstone, and the suspense centers on her machinations to regain her late parents' estate, which has been claimed by a greedy relative who is legally, but not morally, entitled to it. Can Magdalen infiltrate that relative's household in disguise and pick up information by which she might prevail? Or will the wily housekeeper see through Magdalen's masquerade?

But Collins's non-sanguinary example isn't often followed these days, when authors tend to slaughter a character in the first few pages, followed by periodic sacrifices of more gore-smeared victims, to keep the reader's attention from flagging. So this reader perked up when Sean Doolittle opened "Safer" -- his fine thriller about the toll exacted by life in a security-conscious suburb -- on a different note. Paul Callaway and his wife, Sara -- academics who have moved from Boston to join the faculty at an Iowa university -- are hosting a party when the police unexpectedly drop in. "Is something wrong?" Paul asks the officers. Plenty, as it happens. Minutes later, he is under arrest for "suspicion of the sexual exploitation of a minor." That would be Brittany, the precocious 13-year-old next door. We soon learn that the case against Paul is practically a slam-dunk: The cops have pornographic photos of him with the girl.

Bad as things may look for Paul, the reader is pretty sure he's innocent. He's the first-person narrator of the tale, after all, and a self-described "teenage book nerd in a grown man's body." His indignation at being charged with abusing Brittany seems genuine, and he has a sense of humor to boot. "Next to Boston," he observes, "the relative cost of living in Clark Falls, Iowa, seemed like a clerical mistake." Could such a practiced quipster really be a bad guy?

It soon comes out that the Callaways' across-the-street neighbor, Roger Mallory, is a troubled -- and troubling -- soul. A few years back, his young son was raped and murdered (yes, an early-breaking homicide, but it happened offstage), and the harrowing experience has left Roger obsessed with security. A former policeman, he founded a local Neighborhood Patrol, which has become the springboard for a movement he touts regularly on TV. Paul himself has joined the group, and not just to be neighborly. On the night the Callaways moved in, a prowler walked into the wide-open house and assaulted Sara, who escaped serious harm only because Paul returned from an errand in time to chase the guy off.

Otherwise, however, the Callaways were finding the neighborhood a good fit -- until, as we learn in a flashback, Roger showed up on their doorstep a month or so before the arrest to deliver a confounding message: Paul had to go. You heard that right: Roger invoked his authority as neighborhood czar to inform Paul that he couldn't live there anymore (it says something about Roger's screwiness that his ban did not extend to Sara). Paul interprets his arrest and the obviously doctored photos of himself and Brittany as Roger's twisted way of enforcing the diktat.

Doolittle braids these elements into nerve-racking patterns. In a particularly disturbing scene, one day while Roger is out, Paul enters Roger's unlocked house to tend to the man's dog, which is in distress. Once inside, Paul looks around, opens a door and lets himself into a homegrown spy chamber, with live camera hookups to every house on the block. But when Paul calls the police to complain about the invasion of privacy, Roger calmly points out that, if Paul will check, he will see that on moving-in day he initialed a form authorizing the surveillance in the interest of -- what else? -- neighborhood security. To his nausea, Paul finds that Roger is right.

In the book's fourth quarter, the author loses interest in his best creation, that creepy Roger, and allows Clark Falls to become something of an abattoir after all. But the violent, formulaic finish detracts only slightly from an enthralling and unsettling story. Doolittle has written four previous novels, and "Safer" is good enough to make me want to catch up with them all.

Drabelle is the mysteries editor of Book World.

Note: In the future, Patrick Anderson's reviews will appear on the first and third Mondays of the month.