A NOVEL APPROACH

Director and screenwriter Scott Frank brings a cinematic touch to his fiction debut

Shaker (Knopf, 335pp, $34.95) is the first novel by screenwriter and director Scott Frank, who’s written many excellent scripts, including Out of Sight. As one would expect, the dialogue in this tale of a hitman who gets entangled in a mugging-turned-shooting in L.A. is the book’s peak quality. But Frank isn’t content to coast on his ability to craft plot and create characters who tell you where they’re coming from within a single conversation.

Enjoying the full canvas that prose allows for, in this novel that he’s been working at since the early ’90s (with long breaks), Frank provides full backstories for the cop, one of the muggers and especially for hitman Roy Cooper, whose tough childhood and hardening in juvie is detailed in dozens of sometimes momentum-blunting pages. Some of the secondary characters — the slick, Antonio Banderas look- alike mayor, for example — get a little too much page-time, as well. While Roy the hitman’s origin is well- rendered and intriguing, it does begin to hinder the story’s present, as Roy sorts out the disastrous aftermath of what looked like a clean hit, dealing with both cops and wannabe gangsters.

The book has another asset in the cop character, a disgraced female detective named Kelly Maguire who vents her serious rage problem in traffic stops and on criminals who cross a certain line. She’s smart and efficient, and her friendly interrogations of Cooper, along with her more aggressive streetside interactions, are high points in the book.

While there is a little more meandering here than one might expect from a writer who’s written many tight screen thrillers, and sometimes odd repetitions in the prose (a sociology professor is described as looking “more like an ex-fashion model” and again as “more like a fashion model from Town & Country than an academic” on successive pages), this novel has a vivid sense of Los Angeles and the people you would and wouldn’t want to meet there.

Susan Philpott’s Dark Territory (Simon and Schuster, 429pp, $ 19.99) is a twisty thriller about women dedicated to saving other women. The main character, Signy Shepherd, works for an organized network called The Line, a collective of people and safehouses that extracts women in at- risk situations from the homes where they are facing abuse. We meet Signy as she’s pulling off a tricky operation, removing a young woman from an embassy where she lives a life of confinement at the hands of her domineering husband. Getting the woman out safely isn’t easy, and the reader is treated to a demonstration of Signy’s capacity for grisly violence and quick thinking in a situation where she has to keep herself and other women safe.

Her resourcefulness and wellplaced kicks will be called into service repeatedly in this novel, as she aims to protect a young woman named Lizzy Stone and her infant son from Dr. Robert Stone, who initially comes across as a hypersexed, philanthropic mad scientist. Philpott soon complicates the wicked husband/ frightened wife dynamic by suggesting that Lizzy may be having a serious, protracted episode of mental illness — a risky gambit that pays off well, as she handles the psychology and abuse dynamics deftly, perhaps owing to her own background as a mental health professional.

The writing can be a little overactive — there’s a lot of skittering, tottering, bursting into, sashaying, and wobbling in the verbs, as opposed to plain old walking and running, but this is only slightly distracting. Dark Territory is both intense and humorous, with appealing characters and a consistently surprising plot.

Vancouver writer Owen Laukkanen’s latest, The Watcher in the Wall (Putnam, 368pp, $35), starts with the teen suicide of Adrian Miller, classmate of FBI agent Kirk Stevens’s daughter, Andrea. What seems initially to be the tragic outcome of bullying turns out to be a more sinister, more organized and more Web-based evil: an online suicide forum puppeteered by a manipulative long-distance murderer, driving unstable teenagers to take their own lives.

The nasty character behind these manipulations is Randall Gruber, who’s unveiled gradually in intermittent sections by Laukkanen, taking us through Gruber’s background without breaking up the action too much. A nasty stepfather and early steps into voyeurism have led to the setup that Agent Stevens and his partner, Carla Windermere, are dealing with: a ring of suicide encouragement led by a deeply manipulative psychopath who is as good as hiding his true self as he is at eluding capture.

Windermere and Stevens, motivated by the desire to keep Gruber from killing more kids and to atone for their own missed opportunities to reach out in the past, aim to unveil and deal with this killer by whatever means necessary. The chemistry between the two agents feels as authentic as Randall Gruber’s nastiness, and the resultant mixture propels the reader through to an exciting and satisfying conclusion.

FRANK ISN’T CONTENT TO COAST ON HIS ABILITY TO CRAFT PLOT