Fellside

A young boy is dead. Alex Beech was 10 years old, and home alone when his apartment building caught fire. The coroner's report was conclusive: death by smoke inhalation. Within days of the fire, the police and the public have come to the conclusion that his death was no accident: Alex was an unintended murder victim, and Jess Moulson, Alex's downstairs neighbor, is the one who killed him.

As the prosecution presented it, the evidence was clear: Jess and her boyfriend, John, both heroin addicts, had fought. Jess, high and out of her mind with anger, set the apartment ablaze with the intent to kill her boyfriend. He escaped, she was rescued from the flames in the depths of an opiate fog, and Alex was the fire's only victim.

Unable to remember the events of that night, Jess becomes so convinced of her own guilt that she decides to kill herself, refusing food for weeks on end as she wastes away in the Fellside prison infirmary. As Jess's body atrophies and her vital functions weaken, Alex begins to visit, begging her for help. She didn't kill him, he says, but she can find out who did.

M.R. Carey's (The Girl with All the Gifts) prose is elegant and streamlined, with occasional lush imagery bubbling up out of the darkness. Fellside is dark, much darker than many thrillers that feature more brutal crimes or more explicitly evil villains, but its appeal lies in its unflinching depiction of powerlessness. --Emma Page, bookseller at Wellesley Books, Wellesley, Mass.