Watch your back

In Parlato's implausible latest (after What Waits in the Woods), a married couple's relationship dissolves after their daughter disappears. Psychiatrist Eve Thayer has been tapped to lead the medical staff at a new psychiatric center in the Boston suburb of Graybridge, leaving her little time to help her husband, Nathan, with their infant daughter, Rosewyn. As a result, Eve and Nathan have come to depend on their kindly neighbor as a primary babysitter. One night, someone breaks into the couple's house and kidnaps Rosewyn, and the fallout exposes cracks in Eve and Nathan's relationship. Friends and relatives offer the couple unsolicited advice, much of it leading Eve and Nathan to suspect the worst in each other. Meanwhile, detective Rita Myers of the Graybridge PD takes charge of the case and uncovers a bizarre campaign to target and humiliate the couple. Parlato smartly splits the novel into chapters narrated by Eve, Nathan, and Rita, using each perspective switch to cast things in a new light. By the time the finale arrives, however, readers will be frustrated with how many contrivances it took to get there. This fails to stick the landing. Agent: Marlene Stringer, Stringer Literary. (Dec.)

Marital dysfunction is complicated by an inexplicable kidnapping. After a short prologue that finds Nathan Liddle helpless "as a bug on its back" and expecting to be killed at any moment by his beautiful wife, Eve Thayer, a psychiatrist, the story flashes back three weeks to the couple's strained marriage. While their new baby, Rosewyn, is the proverbial bundle of joy, her needs and bouts of ill health add strain to their relationship. So does Nathan's careless extramarital affair with a free-spirited woman named Nicole. A parallel plot thread follows Det. Rita Myers and her handling of multiple local crimes. The two threads converge when Rosewyn is kidnapped from the home of babysitter Barbara Singleton. For a while, suspicion falls on Donald Barry--a disgruntled patient of Eve's--and his wife, Gail, but some strange additional twists widen the circle of suspects. The surprise return of the baby doesn't solve the original crime; it just deepens the mystery. Parlato's thriller is breezy but a bit muddled, full of feints, shadowy suspicion, and an 11th-hour murder. Short chapters ricochet among the first-person perspectives of Eve, Nathan, and Rita, making for a quick read and giving the illusion of pace. Both Eve and Rita commiserate about their jobs and their struggles to achieve the elusive work-life balance, Eve with her old friend Rachel and Rita with her brother Danny. The overall effect resembles a Lifetime thriller: half skillfully executed soap opera, half diffuse whodunit. A lively pop thriller with a pair of hard-working heroines that could almost have been written by AI. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.