Victim's Choice

Unspeakable crimes--rape, mutilation, torture, child murder--not only destroy the lives of their immediate victims but, often, the lives of those close to the victims. That terrible destructiveness lies at the core of this numbingly violent first novel, in which TV journalist Joe Colby, who lives in an unnamed city, is caught in a storm of vigilante justice. A pair calling themselves the Avengers begins a campaign of terrorism against the ""in-justice"" system that allows endless appeals and technical infractions to free the guilty, while hampering the police with inflexible laws. A crime victim himself (his two children were murdered), Joe understands the impulse of the ""Savages""--a name applied to the vengeance seekers in his crime victims' support group. And as host of the TV show Crime and Punishment, Joe has access to cops, victims, right-wing crazies and bleeding-heart liberals. Casualties mount, with the innocent and guilty alike dying. The vigilantes lose whatever sympathy they've gained, and the hunt for them becomes a hunt for sanity and a return to a system of law. McClister's plot moves along briskly, but his characters behave too erratically to remain believable. In just a few pages, Colby moves from blind rage at his children's death, to journalistic eagerness in the face of a hot story, to passionate lust for his girlfriend, leaving the reader struggling to make sense of him--and, by extension, of the novel of which he's the hero. (July)