It is the people as much as the plot that keeps readers returning to Stephen White’s psychological thrillers. At the center of the mix is clinical psychologist Alan Gregory, Ph.D., but the supporting cast — his wife, D.A. Lauren Crowder, and his friend, Boulder detective Sam Purdy — add their own spice to the mix. “The Last Lie” is the 18th installment in the series, and it does not disappoint.
The mansion across the road from Alan’s comfortable home in the Spanish Hills area outside of Boulder has a new owner. It had belonged to good friends, Adrienne and Peter, but they are both dead, by violence and far too young. Alan and Laura have adopted their only child, Jonah.
Alan has taken on work with a young clinician, Hella Zoet. “Hella had asked me to supervise her practice while she established herself professionally in town. She wasn’t required to seek postlicensure supervision. It was something she’d chosen for professional development.”
Home and professional lives collide when Mattin Snow and his wife move in across the road. Snow is a big-time television lawyer, one with a devoted female following for his advice on how to use the law to their advantage.
It’s clear from the first meeting that this is a relationship in which good fences are the best answer to making good neighbors. Alan welcomes Snow to the neighborhood. Snow is concerned only with offering a thinly veiled warning to keep Alan’s dogs from wandering on what is now the Snow family acreage. Which, by the way, is significantly larger than the Gregory family acreage.
The Snows host a housewarming, to which the Gregorys are, of course, not invited. They aren’t a part of the exclusive social circle. To add insult to injury, Alan and one of his dogs are almost run down by a caterer’s van leaving the party, one speeding down the winding road without the aid of headlights.
The day after the housewarming, Alan meets with Hella to discuss her most puzzling patient, “a thirty-four year old systems analyst whom Hella had been seeing for individual psychotherapy since late that same spring. The patient’s presenting problems were unresolved grief issues, depression, and anxiety.” The woman’s husband, a golf pro, had collapsed after a round of golf and died.
The widow is a guest at the Snow housewarming. She had more to drink that she was willing to drive with, and stays the night. She awakes the next morning, disoriented, and leaves. But she slowly comes to the conviction that, despite a huge hole in her memory, she’s been raped.
The case soon becomes one of “he said/she said,” never coming fully out in the public, but simmering behind a veil of high-powered lawyering. Lauren hears some murmurs, because of her role in the prosecutor’s office, but she tells Alan she can’t reveal any information.
Neither can Sam — the case isn’t part of the city’s jurisdiction; it belongs to the county. But Alan intuitively suspects a cause for concern, and follows his hunch. If he’s living adjacent to a sexual predator, in an isolated area, he needs to know. Also, given Hella’s description of the patient, he’s more likely to believe her — or, given his interactions with Snow, less likely to give him the benefit of a doubt.
A case unfolds that parallels Colorado’s Kobe Bryant case, and Sam is the foil used to question the line between serving justice and avoiding the same when the accused has the money to lawyer up.
The triangular pyramid of skills — psychological on Alan’s part, prosecutorial from Lauren and investigative from Sam — is particularly well-suited to this thorny question. And while the question is resolved in “The Last Lie,” it is a larger question that remains hanging over society.
White’s work — the structure, character and pacing of the novel — does not disappoint. He doesn’t race the reader to the puzzle’s solution, instead allowing Alan to consider life while seeking a path.
There are the issues of his marriage, still on the mend, and his adopted son, still traumatized by his losses. And there are his beloved dogs, who emerge as characters nearly as important as the story’s narrator.
The result is a satisfying page-turner that convinces the new reader to read back into the series, and makes the familiar reader impatient for the next installment.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writing living in Centennial.
