Book Review: Complex thriller has reader guessing

"The Fate of Katherine Carr” by Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 276 pages, $25).

The main characters in this fine new novel are obsessed with serial killers, from 16th-century fiend Countess Bathory to more recent psychopaths such as Ed Gein.

One character, for example, shares "every meal with them, every moment of enforced leisure. They trail behind him in a leering throng, rippers and night stalkers. Their scrawled notes are his literature, words written in blood or pieced together crudely from magazine cutouts. For him, Bach is the final gurgling of a strangled child, Renoir what murderers splatter on mirrors, walls and doors.”

Some of these monsters, including Gein, were caught and punished for their crimes, but others got clean away. Or did they? That’s one of the questions Cook asks us to ponder in this disturbing, psychologically complex book.

Cook, author of 21 novels, has been one of our finest writers for years, as readers of "Red Leaves” (2005) and "Master of the Delta” (2008) already know. But Cook’s fan base remains small.

Perhaps that’s because you can’t breeze through his books the way you can with, say, one of Robert Parker’s Spencer novels, enjoying the story and then forgetting it the moment you finish the last page. Cook requires more of readers; he forces you to read thoughtfully, and when you finish his stories, they haunt your dreams.

Perhaps, too, it is because his fiction is hard to categorize. Fans of thrillers are apt to think of his books as literary novels while readers of literature tend to think of them as thrillers. In truth, Cook succeeds brilliantly at both.

"The Fate of Katherine Carr” is further evidence that his work deserves a wider audience.

As the novel begins, a small-town newspaper reporter named George Gates is telling a story to a stranger on a boat as it makes its way up a tropical river.

Gates had once been an adventurous travel writer, he tells his listener. But ever since his young son was kidnapped and murdered, he’s taken refuge in writing fluff about local rose gardens or hardworking immigrants who win the lottery.

He decides one day that Arlo McBride, a retired missing persons detective, might be grist for a light feature. But when they meet up, McBride starts to tell Gates a story about someone who simply vanished 20 years earlier — a young woman named Katherine Carr.

Katherine had been a writer, and after she disappeared, McBride discovered a story she left behind. The story might be a flight of imagination, or it might hold the key to her disappearance, the detective suggests. Once he has Gates’ attention, he doles out the story to the reporter, chapter by chapter. That makes the book a story within a story within a story — a complex structure not easy to pull off. But wait; there’s more.

Gates is also considering writing a profile about Alice Barrows, a 12-year-old girl with progeria, a rare disease that ages children rapidly and then kills them. Alice, it turns out, loves solving mystery stories. So, instead of reading Katherine’s story alone, Gates reads it out loud so they can puzzle over it together.

And so, Cook’s book is a story within a story within a story within a story.

At each level, the novel ponders questions of good and evil, of guilt and retribution, and the power of storytelling itself. And at each level, Cook keeps the reader guessing about what is myth and what is real, filling the reader with foreboding right up to the chilling conclusion.

Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press