Since we fell

OF THE TRUE MYSTERIES of the universe - What is the nature of time? What are the origins of life and is there life on other worlds? - the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction - Who are you, and why are you different from me? - and especially of the mystery genre. Dennis Lehane, as much as any writer, has built a career as a philosopher of the human animal. In books like "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island," he pushed the boundaries between genre and character. Deep down, it would appear, he knows that as much as readers want to know the truth about what happened and how (let's call this plot), what we're most intrigued by is the why. Why do some people commit terrible crimes and not others? Why are some people driven by greed, by jealousy and fear, and how do we recognize these people so we can protect ourselves from them? Because at the end of the day, the guilty among us look just like the innocent. We share the same genes, the same basic environment. We were raised with the same values (for the most part), and yet deep down each of us is a stranger to the other. "Since We Fell," Lehane's latest novel, feels even more than his previous books like a balancing act between a character study and a thriller, one in which the genre nature of the book hides its head for so long that the reader ultimately surrenders the idea that he or she is reading anything other than a literary novel about an attractive and successful young woman slowly surrendering to paranoia and madness. The first thing we learn about Rachel Childs is that she grew up without a father, raised by the kind of mother who drives a surprising amount of literature: largerthan- life, domineering, charismatic. Matriarch as sun and moon, career-driven and non-nurturing. From the time of Rachel's birth, mother and daughter were bound together in a kind of folie à deux. As a result, Rachel grew to define herself in reference to her mother - the ways they were similar, the ways Rachel hoped they were different. And yet at her core how could she avoid adopting her mother's skewed worldview, her uneasy relationship to power, her distrust of other people and - worse - her mother's less-than-flattering opinion of this new and unformed person called Rachel? The daughter was a girl the mother competed with, one she belittled at every turn in order to maintain dominance. It takes a lot for a child to grow up in the shadow of such a narcissistic parent without surrendering to self-loathing and doubt, but it seems at first that Rachel has managed to find some peace and a place for herself. After college she becomes a TV journalist, a talking head with a bright future and a handsome fiancé, himself rising through the ranks at the network. But under it all is a gnawing question: Who is my father, and why did he leave? This is Rachel's mystery, concerned not with the nature of time and space, but with the strange decisions made by the fickle meat inside other people's heads. So in her 20s Rachel begins the quest that will come to define the next decade of her life, the search for a man whose name her mother never told her. The search has twists and turns. At one point she finds the man all evidence suggests is her long-lost daddy, only to learn they share no biological connection. All the while, Rachel somehow manages to live up to the expectations of the normal world - thriving even, at work and in life - but then an assignment to Haiti in the aftermath of a natural disaster leads to a downward spiral. Damaged people, you see, can be propped up and held together by the boundaries of a functional world, but when you drop them into chaos, the chaos inside them rattles free. Rachel self-destructs. Her fiancé leaves her. She loses her job, then her career. Alcohol becomes her solace and she retreats into unchecked anxiety, her insecurities calcifying into agoraphobia. She becomes the waste of space her mother always told her she was. And then - still early in this eventful book - she meets Brian. Or I should say re-meets Brian, because a decade earlier he floated through her life for 10 minutes as a private investigator she hired in her endless search for her father. These days, we learn, Brian has leftthat life behind, returning to the family business his rich father started. He is handsome and successful, and he confesses a secret to Rachel. She is the one who got away. Slowly, with love and patience, Brian brings her out of her shell. He helps reintroduce her to the world. They get married. Her anxiety dulls, fades. Rachel, at long last, has found the peace and love she deserves. And for a time they are happy. But then suspicion - all those old hard-wired patterns of distrust - creep back in. There is a business trip abroad that Rachel comes to believe Brian never took. A sighting of him getting into a waiting car when he was supposed to be traveling overseas. Is he lying to her? Is Brian just another in a long list of manipulators and deceivers - another crazy mother, another abandoning father? This is the mystery. Should we believe the worst about people or the best? Can old patterns change? Can people surprise us for the better? The turn, when it comes, is both satisfying and somehow disappointing. Until now, the high-wire act Lehane has managed - to crafta character thriller, a psychological nail-biter based on real emotion and relatable anxiety - has been the rarest kind of page-turner, one in which character, not plot, drives the book's addictiveness. The thriller that emerges in the last 100- plus pages is more than satisfying on its own merits. Lehane takes all of Rachel's weaknesses, the tools she has used to overcome her deep psychological flaws, and turns them into strengths in navigating a world gone mad. She becomes truly fierce. Freed of the shackles of being normal, she takes her revenge on the world that has abused and manipulated her for her whole life. But at the same time, there is something reductive about the last third of the book. A story that flirted with the unsolvable mysteries of a human being called Rachel becomes a simple tale of what happens next. This is not a knock, necessarily, for readers of Lehane's past work and lovers of the genre. They may feel it takes too long to get to the action, but I loved watching the author walk the tightrope of deeper questions, was thrilled to see him push the boundaries of human understanding for its own merits, without needing an adrenaline fix of life-or-death stakes and villains with guns. Freed of the shackles of being normal, Lehane's heroine takes her revenge on the world. NOAH HAWLEY is the show runner for "Fargo" on FX and the author, most recently, of the thriller "Before the Fall."

Reader Whelan captures the complexity of the protagonist and suspense of Lehane's psychological thriller set in contemporary Boston. The story revolves around Rachel Childs, the once rising star TV news reporter whose career ended in 2009, when she melted down on-air while covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. In the years since, Rachel has remained jobless and emotionally shattered, and become prone to panic attacks. She attributes her crippling anxiety to her absent father, who abandoned her when she was five. Rachel, now in her late 30s, rarely leaves the house except to investigate the identity of her father, which she sees as the antidote to her mental issues. That's how she meets Brian Delacroix, a handsome and charismatic private eye, who becomes her new source of stability and eventually her husband. Yet one bump in the road of married life, and Rachel loses control leading her to conspiracy theories about her husband. Whelan pulls the listener along this ever-twisting plot with a cool, low-key delivery that allows Lehane's clean, proficient prose to flow easily without any embellishments. She keeps characterizations of supporting characters, such as Brian and Rachel's mom, to a minimum, but the dialogue is delivered naturally and easy to follow. Whelan excels at subtly voicing Rachel's interior state as she grows from insecure, agoraphobic recluse to a take-charge woman of action. An Ecco hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.