A PERFECT CRIME

BY PETER ABRAHAMS

For my next novel adventure, I decided to try a brand new writer I've never tried reading before. A Perfect Crime by Peter Abrahams I admit I had only heard about from reading the brief sales summary online after getting the title from a list of books Stephen King included in one of the final sections of his memoir On Writing. And I can honestly say that I'm really glad that I chose to read it because there's a lot that may be said about the book.

While the sales summary does a particularly good job of selling the book, I don't think it accurately describes the novel. Part love triangle and part thriller, A Perfect Crime rethinks the way we traditionally think of the psychological thriller by relying heavily on relationship tensions and even inner tensions.

Abrahams does a wonderful job of crafting two completely different marriages and complicating the hell out of them in a way that they organically feed the plot. But where he falls short is his focus on one central protagonist and his execution of the finer details of the murder plot. He introduces a pair of lovers in the beginning that I didn't find particularly likeable enough to really invest in.

Likewise, as the story goes on, we're introduced to more and more characters (each with a unique story), but their roles are more fluid than clearly defined. Thus making it difficult for a reader to find someone to actually root for as the story unfolds. While that may sound contradictory given the praise I just handed out to developing character relationships, I think it's important to note that in a story like this where relationships are so vital to the inner workings of the structure relationships themselves become characters (in a manner of speaking).

While Abrahams loses focus with individuals, he gives the reader multiple relationships that are fully fleshed out and allow the reader to choose who to root for. Whether this was intentional or not, it's clever and challenges how we perceive character relationships influencing the overall structure of the plot.

Still, while Abrahams shows his ingenuity in this regard, these relationships actually end up obtaining too much power and bogging down the novel with unnecessary sex scenes and over the top drama that detract from the murder plot. The central thriller component ends up coming across as secondary and almost mathematical in its direction (lacking both cleverness until the final 30 pages and fun). It was only after I was 10 pages from the end that I realized the writer was probably having more fun with the drama of marital affairs than the ideas of how to twist the murders around in such a way that they keep the reader on the edge of their seat for the majority of the book. Abrahams tried to keep it too neat and too confined when it could have been better (not perfect but better than okay) if he had just allowed these well-written characters to reach their full potential in fucking up each other's lives.

The end result is that the climax and the ending read just but also undeserved all at once, making A Perfect Crime okay but far from perfect. I would still recommend this read as a decent book to any writer looking to dissect character relationships and find new ways to turn the relationships into characters themselves.

I look forward to seeing what other tricks Abrahams includes in his other novels.