7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a cut above others in the crime genre, August 25, 2000
What makes this book so readable is its pervasive and sly sense of humor. The author doesn't take himself too seriously and writes hilarious scenes with Roger, Francis' stuffy Harvard husband who spends the day locked up in his basement competing with other high IQ crossword puzzle nerds and writing "IQ 181" on his resume. The interior monologues that cover Roger's thoughts as he plots the perfect murder of his adulterous wife are hilarious. The other character who gets a good dose of the humor is the lovable villain, Whitney (Donald!) who is a total nutcase, convicted murderer and very caught up in his own proficiency level. Exactly when he thinks he's humming along doing something brilliant, we see that he's drinking too much and wandering far from his simple mission to kill Francis.
Some have criticized the coincidences and gimmicks, but I really didn't find them intrusive at all. I think that kind of critique misses the point that the author is creating a somewhat absurd set of circumstances to highlight some of the plotting and conventions of detective stories. For sure, his style is engaging and his characters very well drawn. This book was enjoyable from start to finish and a pageturner to boot.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love's Labors Lost, November 15, 2000
Others have noted the writer's beautifully crafted prose, exquisitely drawn characterizations, brilliantly rendered sequences, wonderful ear for dialogue. Peter Abrahams may specialize in genre fiction, but he's as gifted an artist and as textured a stylist as any writer of mainline, literary fiction.
A Perfect Crime focuses on the violent consequences of deceiving oneself and misleading others in the context of an adulterous affair. America's premier, fictional adulteress, Hester Prynne, wore the Scarlet Letter openly, and it became the symbol of her redemption. Dimmesdale's scarlet letter, invisible to the eye, burned through his breast and became the fatal emblem of his sin. Francie's scarlet letter is the voice of a conscience that she barely hears and rarely heeds, an echo that whispers of loyalty and friendship in the world of wealth and social status into whose selfish and shallow sophistication she's been successfully acculturated.
Mired in a loveless marriage, for whose failure she bears an equal responsiblity, Francie begins an affair with Ned whom she imagines she loves but who serves as her means of gratifying her unfulfilled sexual needs even as Ned uses Francie to gratify his own desire for a classy and erotically passionate woman whose attentions flatter his ego, Ned having tired of Anne, his somewhat drab, unassertive wife.
When their pas de deux begins to wear thin, Francie tries to bail out of the relationship, persuading herself that she's doing so out of concern for Anne with whom, by chance, she's become acquainted. Unfortunately, Roger, Francie's maniacally jealous husband, who's uncovered the affair and whose soul is tormented by his isolated contempt for the world, entices Whitey, a demented, psychopathic killer on parole, into a scheme designed to further what Roger takes to be his just revenge.
Some reviewers have commented that the story's twists and turns seem contrived. If so, these contrivances parallel the twists and turns of the characters' tangled web of deception and thus seem natural and credible in the way that an expressionist painting might capture the ambiguity of an emotion or the complexity of a character even though the representation may not be photographically realistic.
As with some of the writer's other novels - especially Hard Rain, Pressure Drop, Revolution # 9 and Lights Out - A Perfect Crime deserves to be read twice for an appreciation of its artistry. For example: Chapter 1 lays the groundwork, via a series of skillful, seemingly innocuous double entendres, for the tale that's about to unfold. In Ned and Francie's first intimate moment at the cabin (the first we're privy to), Ned thinks of some detail at work and is temporarily distracted just as Francie is looking to him for an intense response to something she's just said. Ned places his hand on the chill spot behind Francie's neck, knowing without effort (and perhaps, for that reason, without much real attention) how to warm it as he mouthes a platitude, referring to someone else, about those who play with fire running the risk of getting burned. On Ned's way home from making love with Francie, he stops to pick up some ice cream for his daughter and happens to notice some fresh flowers, irises, "always a safe choice. He bought some for his wife."
Ned isn't Heathcliffe and Roger isn't Raskolnikov. Neither is Francie Emma Bovary. But the passions are as raw and as real.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heir to Ira Levin, October 25, 2004
Not that Ira Levin is gone or anything, but his output has slowed considerably now that he is in old age. In any case, though he isn't quite as good as Levin, Abrahams is very close to being so, and that's a tall order I wouldn't have believed any other American suspense novelist to be capable of. In Abrahams' case, his plots are a little less organic than Levin's, not quite so high concept, but he is twisty as all get out and his characters are amazingly real. You really get caught up in their dilemmas even if some of them are just plain bad apples.
Francie is having an affair with Ned because, well, just because. Roger, her husband, is so weird and cold that in a way you don't blame her, and yet on the other hand, as she comes to realize, she is hurting an innocent woman by sleeping with her husband. She gets hung up on this infidelity thing, as her natural decency kicks in once she befriends Anne at the local tennis club. I don't even like tennis but Abrahams is great at evoking the kick of it, the primal tensions it releases, how the game can hook you in and take you to a place you've never been taken before.
I didn't really buy the part about Whitey Truax and why Roger thought he could possibly control him, but to be fair Abrahams builds Roger up as kind of a Nietzchean superman who's dumb as a post, so I guess it fits. Whitey makes you squirm he's so vicious and horny, but there's also a lot of class resentment between Whitey and Roger that's perfectly done, worthy of a Henry Roth or a Zora Neale Hurston. Abrahams is a literary artist, and each of his books presents another technical problem he solves with the assurance and inventiveness of Flaubert. Here, in A PERFECT CRIME, he approaches the heights of THE TUTOR, not only his own TUTOR, but that of Henry James.
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