about two feet high and three feet long' in the nursery of one of the kids, seemingly on the grounds that it's painted 'nearly the same shade of blue as the walls.' Investigating cops who search a room are unlikely to miss a grain of dust, let alone a wooden chest.Īs for the 'literary' writing? Well, here's Lena on a bus, suffering a minor headache from the cold of a wintry day in Syracuse: For example, at one point the investigators manage to miss 'a small wooden chest. Leaving aside some linguistic oddities (Lena feels 'shocky' at one point people 'wick' their fingers, which I think means they crook them), there are a couple of plot oddities.

In investigating the case, Lena is forced to confront the mysteries of her own origins. Soon she has uncovered the existence of a serial killer, one who's targeting infants in their cribs. When a rich mother makes a direct plea to her to examine the death, supposedly from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), of her baby, Lena ignores the advice of her colleagues and takes a closer look. Lena Dawson is a fingerprints expert with the Syracuse PD. It manages, though, to be a good and modestly gripping tale despite the irritation of our having to wade through puddles of the author's literary pretensions. The beauty and originality of Diana Abu-Jaber's writing are here accompanied by deft, page-turning narrative tension and atmosphere, tugging the reader to an unforgettable conclusion.Ī novel of literary suspense that might have done well to tune back the 'literary' aspect - basically a euphemism for a surfeit of twee, self-indulgent writing. But then there is the mystery of her own childhood to solve.Could the improbable deaths of a half-dozen babies be somehow connected to her own improbable survival?

Orphaned as a child, out of place as an adult, gifted with delicate and terrifying powers of intuition, Lena finds herself playing a critical role in the case. Suddenly, a series of crib deaths-indistinguishable from SIDS except for the fevered testimony of one distraught mother with connections in high places-draws the attention of the police and the national media and raises the possibility of the inconceivable: could there be a serial infant murderer on the loose? Lena is a fingerprint expert at a crime lab in the small city of Syracuse, New York, where winters are cold and deep. A fingerprint expert's investigation of a series of crib deaths leads her back to the mystery of her own childhood.

Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber