Carolyn, wife of small town Ohio attorney Ben Forbes, goes missing: she was supposed to collect her husband after work, but never arrived, and appears to have vanished into thin air. A few days later, Ben receives a phone call from Al Guthrie, the ex-husband of an abused woman whom Ben helped secure a divorce: he has Carolyn, and will release her only if Ben delivers his ex-wife Lorene. And he has just four days to do it.
“An Eye For an Eye” is a tight little crime novel, impeccably paced and wonderfully tense. We are mostly in the heads of Ben Forbes and his friend and police detective Ernie MacGrath, occasionally checking in with Carolyn, Lorene, or Al. Ben is sure that if he goes to the cops, they’ll cause Guthrie to panic and kill Carolyn, but Ben is hardly a smooth operator as he attempts to conduct his own search for Carolyn: he makes MacGrath suspicious with his evasive behavior, and he eventually blunders badly enough to send Guthrie fleeing into the countryside with Carolyn.
It reminded me a little of Jim Thompson, but nowhere near as bleak: Ben is a bumbler, but good at heart, and the local police seem surprisingly competent and free of corruption. Guthrie is definitely a bad apple — abusive, self-centered, and none to bright — but he’s hardly the most wicked character ever to stroll through pages of noir fiction. What stands out is Brackett’s control: she delivers tension at just the right moments, keeps the characters in the dark even when the reader is let in on critical details, and she delivers a true nail-biter of a finale. For a book I grabbed off the $1 spinner rack at DreamHaven, my expectations were more than exceeded.
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