William Morrow © 2008, 297 pages

Peter Abrahams’ Delusion is set in a suburb of New Orleans, Belle Ville, post-”Bernardine” (a stand-in for Katrina, though it’s not clear why that change needed to be made). During the clean-up after the storm a file is found in a police locker that turns out to contain exculpatory evidence in an old case: twenty years earlier, Alvin Dupree had been convicted of the murder of a young scientist. He was positively identified in a line-up by the only eye witness to the crime, the victim’s girlfriend Nell. She is now married to the detective who solved the case, who has since become Belle Ville’s chief of police. The discovery of the evidence threatens to destroy Nell’s world. At first dismissive of the find–she knows what she saw–she comes to doubt her senses and her memory, and finally questions whether the last twenty years of her life have been based on a lie.

[INSET TEXT: At first dismissive of the find–she knows what she saw–she comes to doubt her senses and her memory, and finally questions whether the last twenty years

of her life have been based on a lie.] Delusion is a timely read, both because of the significance of “Bernardine” to the story and because the plot concerns the belated exoneration of a wrongly accused prisoner–not by DNA evidence in this case, but the parallels to the recent spate of overturned convictions based on genetic evidence are clear. The plot is complex, with numerous characters complicating one another’s understanding of the facts by lying at various times, though when we finally learn the motive behind the twenty-year-old crime it seems a little too neat. Most impressively, Abrahams has created in Alvin Dupree a character who is both pathetic and menacing: he may not have killed Nell’s boyfriend back in the day, but he is decidedly not the picture of an innocent man.

Delusion doesn’t offer pulse-pounding suspense. We’re never scaruddy for the characters, exactly, just a little worried now and then. But it’s worth the read.

Tags: book reviews, books, Delusion, Peter Abrahams, suspense

Original post by Debra Hamel