The Whole Truth

When he falls in love with another woman, wealthy Leonard Bradley, an industrialist in upstate New York, asks his wife Phyllis for a divorce. When Phyllis refuses, Leonard, contemplating a long, painful legal battle and a large settlement, grows resentful, and begins to fantasize her providential disappearance. In a bizarre twist, she does just that--vanishes--her body found in the woods several days later, raped, sodomized and shot. All the evidence (and Phyllis's $2 million life insurance policy) points to Leonard. In a desperate attempt to clear his name, he decides to tell the whole truth: to confess that in his heart he had wished Phyllis dead. His neglected and heretofore embittered children rally around him, while on the other side of town, a lurid melodrama involving a policeman, an abused wife and her truck-driver husband reveals to the reader the true circumstances of the murder. Though the plot is potentially suspenseful, Robinson's ( Home Again, Home Again ) clumsily constructed novel, with its stilted dialogue, dull characterizations and graceless prose, makes a bland and unappealing read. (May)