Safer by Sean Doolittle

I opened the box labeled Callaway and followed my own rabbit down into its hole.
-- Sean Doolittle, Safer (Delacorte, 2009).

Safer captures all the horrors of a small town, like the one in which I grew up:  forced conformity, excessive deference to authority, intrusive nosiness, rampant anti-intellectualism.  I finally made my escape from a town in which my parents called the police whenever I questioned their authority, where there was no library because the taxpayers voted against funding one, where parents of high school students rebelled when their children were assigned complete books in English class and where authority was powerful at home and in school and child abuse was common.  In Doolittle's book Paul and Sara Callaway move from Boston to Clark Falls for new jobs and suffer all the horrors of a small town where everyone is (too) friendly.

The errors Paul and Sara make are mostly about keeping too much to themselves and the responses from their neighbors are extreme but only different in degree from what happens in most small towns.  When the Callaways are encouraged to move out they refuse and Paul is framed for the sexual abuse of a thirteen-year-old neighbor to whom he made the mistake of loaning books.  Doolittle flashes forward and backward in time from Paul's arrest, artfully framing the history of the block on which the Callaways live, where one neighbor has been videotaping all the homes on the block. The one flaw I found in Doolittle's narrative is that Paul is eventually exonerated because of the lack of tattoos in the pictures Paul is accused of taking, which meant that the pictures were taken before the Callaways moved to Clark Falls; this has all the conviction of a deus ex machina.

Sometimes I am asked how I decide what books to read and the answer is that there are many sources; it is occasionally random and often due to reviews and articles in the periodicals I read, including "The New York Review of Books," "The London Review of Books," "The New York Times," "The New Criterion," et al.  I read Doolittle's book because I read an intelligent interview with him in Eddie Muller's excellent online "Noir City," which also has incisive film and book reviews.