A Perfect Crime (Hardcover)

by Peter Abrahams (Author) "Thursday, the best day of the week-the day of all days that Francie was predisposed to say yes..." (more)
Key Phrases: wiry women, car phone buzzed, radio boy, New Hampshire, Sue Savard, Kira Chang (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Though he is a very smart man (his IQ is 181, "on a bad day"), Roger Cullingwood is remarkably unperceptive. It takes months for him to realize that his wife Francie is involved with another man. But once he recognizes the affair, he hatches a plot to kill her--the perfect crime of the title--in less time than it takes him to finish the London Times crossword puzzle. It makes perfect sense that Roger wouldn't dream of doing the dirty deed himself; there's a paroled killer conveniently on hand, an easily manipulated psychotic named Whitey Truax. It's when Anne Franklin, the wife of Francie's lover, blunders into the murder scene Roger has so carefully contrived that the novel begins to get interesting. There are a few diversions to entertain the reader en route to the bloody denouement, including a couple of lively tennis matches. In one of the book's many coincidences, Francie ends up partnered with her lover's wife in a championship tournament. The sex is better than the violence, but what Abrahams excels at is pace; you could start and finish A Perfect Crime on the New York to Los Angeles redeye and still have time for a nap before the plane lands. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly
A Boston woman's ill-advised affair with a talk-show host leads to murder and mayhem in this initially absorbing but somewhat contrived thriller from the author of The Fan and Lights Out. Art critic Francie Cullingwood is the beautiful, sophisticated and dissatisfied protagonist who seeks sexual satisfaction outside her stale marriage. Her lover is Ned DeMarco, a handsome, touchy-feely psychiatrist who hosts a radio show for the emotionally forlorn. Their passionate arrangement begins to unravel when Roger, Francie's brilliant but angry husband (a Harvard summa who's been fired from his job as a securities analyst), suspects her adultery and hires a hit man, Whitey Truax, to exact revenge on his spouse. Truax, it turns out, is a serial killer with a very short fuse. The tension rises as Abrahams cuts between the plot participants: Ned's wife, Anne, becomes Francie's tennis partner, making Francie aware of the damage the affair is causing, while Ned desperately clings to their involvement and Roger plots his bizarre campaign of retribution. The initial showdown between Whitey and his potential victims takes place at the adulterous couple's love nest, a New Hampshire cottage that quickly becomes a house of horrors when Whitey suspects Roger of double-crossing him, and runs amok on a killing spree that eventually leads back to Boston. Abrahams does his best work in a series of well-crafted early scenes that effectively convey the different levels of emotional duplicity among the protagonists, but the actual murders are strictly formulaic. While Francie, Ned and Anne are well-drawn, Abrahams's portrayals of both Roger and his minion lack dimension; they are both plot devices whose ludicrous partnership never carries the ring of credibility. Even so, as he explores Francie's emotional terrain in the wake of tragedy, Abrahams will keep readers very much engaged. Agent, Molly Friedrich; 100,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 322 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1st edition (September 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345423844
• ISBN-13: 978-0345423849
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #242,445 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a cut above others in the crime genre, August 25, 2000

By	M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Perfect Crime (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heir to Ira Levin, October 25, 2004

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love's Labors Lost, November 15, 2000

By	mayday - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Perfect Crime (Mass Market Paperback)

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.