Benedict, Elizabeth: The Practice of Deceit

Houghton Mifflin © 2005, 268 pages [amazon]

We know almost from the outset of his story that Eric Lavender's marriage is in trouble. He is, after all, telling that story from a holding cell in the Scarsdale Police Department, and it's a complaint from Eric's wife that's landed him there. But only a few weeks earlier Eric had been obliviously happy in his three-and-a-half-year marriage to Colleen, a divorce attorney known to her colleagues--if not her husband--as a barracuda when it comes to extracting blood from her clients' exes. Colleen's opening shot in a battle Eric had only dimly been aware was brewing is the police report she's filed alleging that Eric sexually molested his stepdaughter, Colleen's four-year-old from a previous relationship. Sitting on the hard bench in his cell with time on his hands, Eric begins to explain how things fell apart for him, a tale whose roots go back to the day he met Colleen. Four years earlier, still recovering from the emotional trauma of being abandoned by her husband while she was pregnant, Colleen boldly took the lead in wooing and winning Eric. In less than a year he'd left behind his apartment and his psychotherapy practice in New York and moved into her Scarsdale home, where he set about talking the community's pampered scions through their relatively uninteresting problems.

Sitting on the hard bench in his cell with time on his hands, Eric begins to explain how things fell apart for him, a tale whose roots go back to the day he met Colleen.The trouble in their marriage starts when the wife of one of Eric's patients hires Colleen as a divorce lawyer. Colleen's hostile behavior when confronted with the problem of this conflict of interest--she and Eric are now ranged on either side of a domestic dispute--prompts Eric to take a closer look at the enigmatic woman he's married to. He gradually uncovers evidence that suggests she has been less than truthful to him about her background. The story of Eric's relationship with Colleen becomes mesmerizing as he slowly peels back the layers of his wife's perfidy, discovering as he does that he hardly knows her, that he cannot trust the woman who, chillingly, is now, as he's telling the story, acting as sole parent to their daughters.

Elizabeth Benedict's The Practice of Deceit is one of those rare books one is loath to see the end of. Smoothly written and well plotted, the book manages to be both quiet and suspenseful. I would have preferred that the final chapter of the book not be epistolary in form, and there is one action taken by the protagonist that continues to confuse me (his call to a client while in prison), but these are minor quibbles about a very good book.

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