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Projection is the Keith Ablow novel where his Frank Clevenger character starts to acquire genuine series weight. A state psychiatric hospital patient is murdered, and the only available witness is a young woman whose dissociative-identity presentation makes her testimony, in the legal sense, almost useless. Clevenger is brought in to assess her and to negotiate the boundary between her selves.
Ablow's strongest material is in the clinical scenes, and Projection has more of them than the debut did. The dissociative-identity material is handled with more care than the genre usually allows; Ablow does not turn the patient's presentation into a thriller device, which the form often does. The murder plot underneath is taut.
Four stars. The strongest Clevenger novel in the early series and one of the better psychiatric thrillers of the late 90s.
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