Flowers of Evil

Take Ozzie Rudd. He’s got “perp” written all over him. He was one of a group of teenage boys in Flowering Dogwood, Maine, who shot and beheaded stray cats. Then he was a suspect in the murder of Melissa D’Agostino, a developmentally disabled girl found strangled in a pasture. Now, in Alice Blanchard’s fine debut suspense novel, he’s the man who finds Claire Castillo, kidnapped daughter of the town’s leading doctor, as she crawls out of the woods, grotesquely mutilated.

No charges have ever stuck to him, but the police haven’t forgotten him. They consider him a probable killer walking around loose, “one sick [obscenity].”

But then, again, there’s Billy Storrow, son of Nalen Storrow, the police chief, who discovered Melissa’s body. Billy, too, was involved in the cat killings, and Nalen, who drank and beat Billy when he was young, blamed himself for the boy’s problems and committed suicide rather than face the possibility that Billy might indeed have killed Melissa. Now, Billy’s sister, Rachel, is a detective on the Flowering Dogwood force. She reopens Melissa’s case and is shocked to learn that her brother was a suspect. She’s dismayed to see how closely he fits a certain criminal profile: compulsive neatness, poor relations with women, et cetera.

Blanchard, a Los Angeles resident whose story collection “The Stuntman’s Daughter” won a Katherine Anne Porter award, is willing to show us a disarming normality inside these men’s minds. When Rudd is interviewed by Rachel, “he thought for some strange reason that maybe she wanted to see him because she’d had a dream about him recently. Sometimes he had dreams about people he hadn’t seen in ages, and that made him want to talk to them again.”

It’s a nice touch, one of the many deft little strokes with which Blanchard brushes in her portrait of a pretty Maine town being stalked by inexplicable evil. In Rudd’s case, we see how a juvenile delinquent can grow up to be a troubled but basically decent man with an ex-wife and a blind daughter.

We see into Billy’s mind, too. He works as a teacher’s aide under Claire Castillo at a state school for blind, head-injured and otherwise disabled children. He’s unambitious for a man in his 30s and upset about Rachel’s digging up of his past, but he’s kind to his students and in love with Claire. No way, we think, could he want to hurt her--unless Blanchard is leading us on.

*

Writers of second-rate thrillers often do. They adopt multiple points of view but give us highly selective glimpses of what their characters are thinking. They break an implicit contract with their readers: that a killer, for instance, may not at any given moment be thinking of his crime, but our knowledge of the crime should in some way shadow whatever he is thinking about, no matter how innocuous.

Blanchard, however, is anything but a second-rate writer. “Darkness Peering” inspires confidence from the very first page. She knows her way around a police station, a morgue and an emergency room. The scenes with disabled children go far beyond using their blindness for symbolic purposes. Details and characters are so well drawn that we’re put into a pleasant dilemma: We want to solve the mystery--the suspense is urgent--but we also want to take our sweet time getting there.

Blanchard manages to make us forget most of what Stephen King has done with evil in little Maine towns; Flowering Dogwood is her own place. And if there’s nothing original in the idea that abused children grow up to be abusers, she composes striking variations on it.

Yet in the end, Blanchard does cheat--but just a little. She follows the climax with a second shock after we’ve dropped our guard, a final, gut-churning twist that’s supposed to tie everything together even as it surprises us. That old devil the thriller genre must have made her do it. Mislead us, that is, with a character-rendering that didn’t leave enough room for such a terrible revelation. Does this lone flaw spoil a novel with so many virtues? Not necessarily, but it makes us doubly impatient for Blanchard to write another one, so we can find out for sure.