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The Tutor is Peter Abrahams in his domestic-suspense register, where he is unusually good. A Connecticut family hires a tutor for their underachieving high-school son. The tutor, Julian, is brilliant and personable and unsettling. Most of the book is the small accumulation of details that the family does not notice in time.
Abrahams writes the family's perspective with care. The father is a divorce attorney with quiet problems of his own. The mother is more attentive than her husband but distracted by professional ambition. The son is a believable teenager rather than a thriller-puzzle teenager. By the time you and they understand who Julian is, the book is in motion.
The resolution is satisfying without being neat. Four stars. One of the better domestic suspense novels of its decade.
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