The Monsters of Gramercy Park

Although slow at first, the debut novel of 33-year-old Brit Leigh soon reveals itself to be a taut psychological thriller mostly worthy of its Kate Atkinson blurb. Popular crime novelist Lizbeth Greene is on the skids: secretly hooked on junk, she's pregnant by an indifferent boyfriend, and her new book is (surprise) a dud. Desperate to jump-start her declining career, Greene senses a hot story in Wilson Velez, the leader of New York's ultraviolent Sacred Incan Royals gang, who is serving a life sentence and has just finished five years in solitary confinement. Wilson plays a pitiful, demented wreck who still manages to advocate prison reform, write children's stories and claim his innocence; Lizbeth sees only a meal ticket. As the Silence of the Lambs –like interviews progress, Lizbeth learns the graphic and brutal details of prison life and of Wilson's rise as gang leader, and he learns how to subtly blackmail her. The elements are familiar, but Leigh's depictions of prison life are unusually intense, and the smarmy lawyer, clever priest and cynical federal gang task force he introduces add who-are-the-good-guys depth. The ending feels a bit strained, playing on Lizbeth's fiction writer's sense of what's real and what's invented, but it nicely incorporates the title's monsters, who are threaded in menacingly throughout. (Sept. 5)