A brutal murder is also at the heart of Rosellen Brown's Before and After, and like Tartt's novel, it was an immediate bestseller, with the film rights quickly snapped up. Beyond this, however, the two novels have little in common. Brown is an intelligent, thoughtful writer, of poetry as well as fiction, who is not tempted into pretension. Her new novel is a domestic tragedy about a family of recognizable human beings whose normally stable, predictably uneventful life is shattered by an act of willful savagery.

Ben and Carolyn Reiser, with their twelve-year-old daughter Judith and seventeen-year-old son Jacob, live in a small New Hampshire town, where Carolyn is a busy pediatrician and Ben is a sculptor who works at home and manages the household. At her hospital Carolyn is summoned one afternoon to examine the body of a young girl bludgeoned to death in an icy field. Horrified by the gruesomely crushed skull, Carolyn soon learns that Jacob was entangled with the girl, was seen talking to her before the body was discovered, and is obviously a strong suspect. Worse, Jacob has disappeared. When his father, hot-headed and impetuous, realizes how Jacob's absence will be construed by the police, he rushes out to his son's car, where he finds a bloodied jack and other incriminating evidence that he proceeds to destroy.

Despite the melodrama, it is clear from the start that Rosellen Brown is not manipulating a suspensefully delayed revelation about the murder but is concerned with the suffering that Jacob's crime inflicts on his family, and the ethical confusion and terror they are now forced, painfully, to confront. Relentlessly, Brown circles around some disturbing conundrums: Do parents ever really know their children? Is there any conceivable way of reconciling the conflicting demands of justice and family ties? How can a parent cope with the indisputable evidence of evil in a beloved child?

Brown attempts to deal with these unnerving questions by dividing the narrative among three voices, those of Ben, Carolyn, and Judith, each offering different points of view about Jacob and the murder. But the boy is not heard directly, as though to emphasize his stark and terrible difference from the others. He clings to his sullen, disquieting silence, shattering the nerves of his parents and sister, until, home on bail and awaiting trial, he tearfully blurts out his version of that fateful night; but his parents know it is less than the truth. Each of them is determined to make different use of the truth they've grasped, and their irreconcilable decisions splinter the family more gravely than ever. Ben insists, “I had no illusions. But he was my son, and my love is not provisional upon his actions or his goodness,” and he refuses to testify against Jacob. Carolyn, the last of the true believers in justice, and haunted by the indelible memory of the girl's bloody skull, tells the court the truth. Yet the trial ends in a hung jury, setting Jacob free.

Unfortunately, as the antagonistic moralities clash, Brown's dramatic scheme becomes too schematic and contrived. The father's unconditional support for his son, which he dubiously regards as a form of forgiveness, is asserted over and over again, but it is never credibly demonstrated. The mother's uncompromising intransigence seems equally implausible. Only twelve-year-old Judith is allowed to speak words of wisdom instead of the exclamatory shallowness assigned to her parents, for Judith alone seems to have any awareness of the reality of evil: “I mean, aren't there people who are just plain not nice?”

In the end we are left with only an ambiguous and irresolute sense of the irreparable damage that the murder has done to all the Reisers, and a mawkish finale merely papers over the cracks, moral and psychological, that Brown has failed to confront. We don't encounter the decisive, probing intelligence this novelist brought to an earlier book, Civil Wars, about the post-partum depression of civil-rights militants bereft of their causes by history. Reading Before and After, with its considerable wealth of acute observation and social detail, we can't help feeling cheated by the equivocal ending that Brown settles for, rather than a hard-won quest for an answer to her terrible question, “If your son was a killer, what would you do?”