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Peter Abrahams's A Perfect Crime is a deliberate 90s update of the Patricia Highsmith model: take two morally compromised men, give them a perfectly logical reason to kill for each other, and watch the logic carry them somewhere awful. Roger Cullingwood is a financially failing PhD in Boston whose wife is having an affair. Whitey Truax is an ex-con whose wife also left him long ago. They meet. They talk. They notice that an exchange of victims would be elegant.
Abrahams writes the slow incremental rationalization of bad people very well. The book reads quickly because the moral horror is in the small steps rather than the obvious ones. Roger's academic vanity and Whitey's self-pity are different kinds of poison, and the book makes you watch both at work.
There is a child in the story that I think Abrahams handles less well than the rest. The adult characters are sharper. Four stars. Recommended for anyone who loved the Highsmith original and wants a competent modern variation.
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