Paris, B.A. Behind Closed Doors. HarperCollins London, 2016. F;6/17.

This one is either light summer reading or a penetrating look at psychopathy, depending on how seriously you take the idea that there are a lot of brilliant horrifying bastards (nearly all men) bent on visiting big-time nastiness on helpless victims (nearly all women), lurking everywhere. That’s almost a spoiler, but come on: the title lets us in the door for at least weird sex but maybe also a dose of serious dirt being done, in secret.

The author baits her hook on page one with a rich pretty-close-to-flawless professional couple entertaining more of the same who all envy the hosts’ relationship, good looks, money, good taste, and the rest of the sort of thing sophisticated intellectuals buy People and watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians for.  But already early hints pop up that there is something not quite perfect Behind those Closed Doors.

Grace, the wife, has a Down syndrome sister Millie who figured in Grace’s public-park meeting of her husband Jack about a year ago. Millie is ideally cared for in an (expensive) private school with a full-time caregiver, but will be moving into the couple’s magnificent home shortly.

(REAL spoiler alert) Jack of course is an uber-textbook psychopath who marries Grace with the idea of imprisoning innocent childlike Millie in a terrifying red basement room and delighting in her suffering. Any fun one has reading this story involves the mind games between Grace and Jack as she attempts to escape his clutches and prevent Millie’s real-life nightmare. But OMG clever Jack is always one jump ahead. It’s intriguing (but you’d have to be more histrionic and credulous even than me to call it terrifying) to see poor Grace stuck: she desperately needs to, but can’t, get anybody to believe her as Jack steamrollers all escape routes with the idea that Grace is a schizophrenic full of outrageous delusions. (End spoiler alert)

And then of course in the end we find out who finally outsmarts who and wins. Fun, hm?

You could try to inject some significance into the experience if you thought that the plot was designed to show us (using an exaggerated version) that control of other people goes on everywhere and all the time and mostly goes unrecognized because it seems to be part of human traffic, or really is a part of human traffic. I think it was Mary Gaitskill who said that every relationship involves power in some way, and to me that’s interesting: if it were true it wouldn’t mean that power in a relationship always operates in one direction only, or that it isn’t at least partly benign. Protective, say. But trying to burrow deep into the significance of Behind Closed Doors I didn’t come up with a whole lot of evidence that Ms Paris (she’s female) intended such ideas, even unconsciously.

Overall I was fine going along on this thriller ride, to take a rest from the big serious literary stuff we all prefer…….. 7.3/7.5