Suspicion, secrets mix in tepid tale of academia

STEPHEN AMIDON (GREG MARTIN)

In "Security," Stephen Amidon's semi-thriller set in New England, the super-wealthy financial wizard who serves as villain gets his comeuppance.

It gives nothing away to identify Doyle Cutler as the bad guy; after all, we learn near the start that he has a clammy aversion to shaking hands. Nor, since "Security" is that kind of fictional gadget, does it give much away to disclose Doyle's just "dessert": It is a kind of fictional packaged vanilla pudding.

Pudding may slip down easily enough, and "Security" exerts an amiable hold once the suspense burns through the bland setting and cast. What the cast turns out to have done, or not to have done, is more interesting than its members.

Several stories converge. The mystery part is set off when Mary Steckl, a working-class student at a local college, stumbles home with a dislocated shoulder and a story of having been brutally sexually assaulted by Doyle in his hillside mansion.

The police believe she is covering up for her father, whom they'd twice arrested - once for allegedly exposing himself to a child, another time for assaulting an officer. Walter Steckl, an electrician whose erratic temper worsened after he was electrocuted at work (and was aggravated by a Tasering during his arrest), denied both charges and was acquitted. Police resented the ruling, and this makes him a convenient suspect, far preferable to Doyle with his wealth, powerful connections, and financial commitment to developing a town park.

The unraveling is left to Edward Inman, who operates a local security service that Doyle subscribes to. The triggering of Doyle's alarm system one night prompts Edward to make a cursory investigation. He gets deeply involved, though, only when during his nightly wanderings - he is an insomniac lovelessly married to the town's ambitious mayor - he visits Kathryn, an old love, and their passion reignites.

Kathryn confides her worry about her son Conor, whom Edward had encountered drunk and distraught near the college on the night of the assault and the alarm. Conor works part time for Doyle and backs up his story. Namely that he and Stuart Symes, Mary's writing teacher, had spotted her out walking and upset, had driven her to Doyle's house to soothe her, and then had Conor take her back to town. And that no assault took place.

Eventually, what with Edward's patiently persistent questioning and Conor's guilty anguish, the story breaks down. The boy reveals his shameful job catering to Doyle's voyeuristic sexual perversions, his employer's assault that night on Mary, and his own intervention, in a belated return of decency, to help her get away.

Stuart's less than creditable reason for being with Doyle - an arrogantly snooty novelist, he was ghosting a lavishly paid book for Doyle - only comes out toward the end (Amidon's decision to withhold it creates more puzzlement than mystery). His presence early in the evening, before Doyle is revealed as a fiend, serves to connect up an extensive side story: the affair he has been having with Angela, one of his writing students.

It is a much-thumbed fictional cliché: Student moons over sexy young teacher who praises her writing. She draws an illicit thrill from secretly sleeping with him, and comes to believe that she can cure his writers' block by having him throw up his job and run off to New York with her. Her voice, telling this, is a tape of a mouse advancing into a mousetrap, but run backwards. We begin, so obvious is the outcome, by knowing the mouse is dead and go on to the advancing.

Amidon gives his mouse an occasional sharply touching line. When Stuart predictably throws her over, she muses that "without [him] she was just another student. . . . a girl without qualities." Later, after bitterly confronting him, she recalls the happiness she'd found in what, of course, was an abusive relationship.

A hint perhaps that a teacher-student romance is not altogether and always to be condemned? It's not clear that this is Amidon's point, but in the hopscotch twists of political correctness he tends to hop the other way.

He is a satirist of campus mores: the assault on Mary - assumed at that point to be by her father - immediately produces a rash of "I am a victim" posters and a "Take Back the Night" rally. More wittily, he does a parody of the narrowly self-referential first-person stories produced and solemnly analyzed in the lower reaches of creative writing programs.

These are bright spots in a fairly mediocre effort. Potboilers require heat; Amidon, a clean and scrupulous writer, does a tasteful pot, but his fire flickers, perhaps because his conviction does.

Richard Eder reviews books for various publications.