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Overview
For Nat and his new friends, Grace and Izzie Zorn, twin sisters as seductive as they are elusive, it was the perfect plan for some quick cash. A bold scheme with an admirable motive: to save the bright future of a deserving young man. And the victim, too, was deserving--an arrogant billionaire who would hardly notice a financial loss. All the plotters needed was a believable story, desperate and frightening, but false. Nothing bad was supposed to happen. They were only crying wolf. But what if the wolf were real? For someone in the shadows is listening, someone who thinks he deserves an even brighter future. Now a risky but basically innocent game will take a horrifying turn. . . .Editorials
Marilyn Stasio
Each stage of this perverse puzzle has been constructed with deadly artistry. . ..Peter Abrahams gets the human dimensions just right.— The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly -
A Boston woman's ill-advised affair with a talk-show host leads to murder and mayhem in this initially absorbing but somewhat contrived thriller from the author of The Fan and Lights Out.Art critic Francie Cullingwood is the beautiful, sophisticated and dissatisfied protagonist who seeks sexual satisfaction outside her stale marriage. Her lover is Ned DeMarco, a handsome, touchy-feely psychiatrist who hosts a radio show for the emotionally forlorn. Their passionate arrangement begins to unravel when Roger, Francie's brilliant but angry husband (a Harvard summa who's been fired from his job as a securities analyst), suspects her adultery and hires a hit man, Whitey Truax, to exact revenge on his spouse. Truax, it turns out, is a serial killer with a very short fuse. The tension rises as Abrahams cuts between the plot participants: Ned's wife, Anne, becomes Francie's tennis partner, making Francie aware of the damage the affair is causing, while Ned desperately clings to their involvement and Roger plots his bizarre campaign of retribution.
The initial showdown between Whitey and his potential victims takes place at the adulterous couple's love nest, a New Hampshire cottage that quickly becomes a house of horrors when Whitey suspects Roger of double-crossing him, and runs amok on a killing spree that eventually leads back to Boston.
Abrahams does his best work in a series of well-crafted early scenes that effectively convey the different levels of emotional duplicity among the protagonists, but the actual murders are strictly formulaic. While Francie, Ned and Anne are well-drawn, Abrahams's portrayals of both Roger and his minion lack dimension; they are both plot devices whose ludicrous partnership never carries the ring of credibility. Even so, as he explores Francie's emotional terrain in the wake of tragedy, Abrahams will keep readers very much engaged.
Library Journal
The discovery of an adulterous affair leads a brilliant but unstable man to plot the perfect murder.Francie and Ned, both married to others, meet illicitly at a cabin in the New Hampshire woods. Francie decides to end the affair when she discovers that her new tennis partner is Ned's wife, who suspects Ned of being unfaithful but is unaware of Francie's involvement. Francie's husband, Roger, suspects, too -- and plots a deadly trap for the lovers at their remote hideaway.
Edgar-nominee Abrahams (The Fan) weaves a tight web of deception and intrigue involving the two couples, a sheriff whose wife was brutally murdered years ago, and a desperate ex-con who becomes Roger's pawn in his murderous game. A Perfect Crime is fast-paced, tense, even witty as it careens to its bloody conclusion. -- Karen Anderson, Arizona State University West Library, Phoenix
Marilyn Stasio
Each stage of this perverse puzzle has been constructed with deadly artistry. . ..Peter Abrahams gets the human dimensions just right. -- The New York Times Book ReviewKirkus Reviews
A simple case of adultery leads to more fatalities than the Gulf War in Abrahams's tense, formulaic domestic thriller. Since Beacon Hill art consultant Francie Cullingwood's old friend Brenda, Countess Vasari, doesn't leave Rome from year to year for the chillier comforts of her cottage on its own New Hampshire island, it's only natural that she give Francie the keys so that she can check up on the cottage from time to time—and just as natural for Francie to use it to entertain her friend Dr. Ned Demarco, the bronzed phone-in radio guru of 'Intimately Yours.' All goes well with their weekly trysts until (1) Francie's husband Roger, fired from his executive-level job despite the stratospheric IQ, catches on to his wife's dalliance, and (2) Francie realizes that Anne Franklin, the warmly appealing tennis partner with whom she's making a run at the club championship, is Ned's wife. Lovable Anne doesn't suspect a thing, of course, but Roger, with all those unemployed IQ points idling on high, wastes no time in plotting 'murder most antiseptic.' Taking the first of several leaves from 'Dial M for Murder,' he decides that the least suspicious way to get rid of Francie is to hire a cat's paw he can kill himself moments after his unwitting accomplice pulls the trigger. And there's a perfect candidate waiting in the wings: Whitey Truax, now on parole in Florida after raping and murdering Sue Savard, the wife of the police chief who'll be investigating the case.Better-read fans than Roger will know, of course, that the choice of Whitey (whose determined stupidity, a savagely comic echo of Roger's shallow arrogance, is Abrahams's most original touch) is the last thing that will go rightwith Roger's foolproof, but not geniusproof, scheme. One other surefire prediction: With Hard Rain (1987) and The Fan (1995) already turned into Hollywood movies, this property, suitably pruned and tightened, can't be far behind.