BOOKS: MISPLACED CONFIDENCES

Susan Isaacs has written a succession of deft, funny thrillers set on Long Island, New York–Compromising Positions is one of the best–about wise-guy women who talk themselves in and out of some fairly deadly predicaments. The better half of her new novel, Lily White (HarperCollins; 460 pages; $25), carries on cheerfully with this agreeable storytelling. The main character, Lily White, is a 45-year-old defense attorney whose new client is a gifted con man. He’s a tall, awkward fellow who seems too clumsy to be slick, but his specialty is romancing rich, lonely, middle-aged women, and he is very good at it. Alas, however, his latest conquest has been found dead, with the marks of large hands on her throat.

This part of the novel is a series of duels, the most conventional of which is between attorney White and a brassy, shrewd woman prosecutor who’s sure she has the con man nailed for murder. White handles this courthouse skirmishing well enough but flounders when she tries to get a sense from her slippery client of what really happened. Although she is middle-aged, and maybe a bit lonely as well, White is too self-possessed to fall for this road-company Andy Griffith. Still, she does begin to think he may be innocent of murder. That impression grows when his girlfriend turns up. She is young and gorgeous, and as empty-headed as a golden retriever pup. Or so it seems, as she backs up her man with a series of contradictory stories. But she is also very tall, and the prints of her large hands, it develops, are all over the victim’s home. Suspicion shifts, and the con man changes his already woozy account, apparently to protect his partner, though of course protecting her implies she needs protection.

This is wonderful authorly misdirection, with sharply drawn characters and suitably murky conflicts. Reality for the two swindlers, and possibly for the defense attorney, is entirely fluid, simply what someone can be made to believe at any given moment. Well into the book, the reader has not figured things out.

That’s the good part. What is exasperating about Isaacs’ novel is that every even-numbered chapter breaks off from this engaging legal drama to spin out a whiny and exceedingly slow-moving melodrama of Lily White’s fretful childhood and early adult years. Her younger sister, we learn at great length, was pretty and petulant and absorbed all their parents’ attention; her father was a Jewish businessman who tried unsuccessfully to be a Wasp; the husband Lily eventually married was handsome but shallow.

These discursive interruptions, the sort of droning stuff therapists are paid to listen to, or that a patient friend hears well into the second bottle of white wine, tell nothing of importance about the title figure that couldn’t have been handled in half a dozen brisk paragraphs. The flashback chapters turn a tidy, well-told book into a fat, soggy one.

–By John Skow