The Good Lie

Dr. Gwen Moore has spent a decade in Los Angeles listening to violent men explain themselves. She is very good at it, and she has her own reasons for the work. When a seventh victim of the Bloody Heart Killer escapes and names his high school teacher, Randall Thompson, the case looks closed.

Defense attorney Robert Kavin does not think so. His own son was one of the six boys who did not escape, and he takes Thompson's case anyway. He wants Gwen to interview the accused and build a profile of the real killer. She agrees, and the closer she and Robert become, the harder it is to tell whose account of events is being managed.

A. R. Torre writes a standalone psychological thriller about the distance between expertise and certainty. The subject matter — the murder of teenage boys — is handled directly, and the book's pleasures are its narrators' secrets rather than its violence.