CRACK AT DUSK, CROOK OF DAWN

A therapist and her Native American husband use a wide array of healing techniques to save the soul of a young boy who is abducted and sodomized in Cogan's latest, a heartfelt but uneven effort that begins when nine-year-old Adam Arbre and his "girlfriend" June are kidnapped from their small town in upper Michigan. The boy is found a few days later, but his violent behavior after the incident leads his parents to turn to Dr. Meggie O'Connor to help him deal with the aftermath. When the medical trail hits a wall, O'Connor teams up with her husband, Hawk, who believes the boy's soul has been stolen by evil spirits, and the couple arrange several Native American ceremonies and rituals to augment the therapy process. Cogan, a clinical psychologist who also performs Native American ceremonies and is married to a Cherokee storyteller, writer and healer, does her best work describing the therapeutic process, as well as how the incident and the girl's subsequent death affect the professionals and neighbors who team up to help Adam. But she overplots by adding too many secondary characters, and the mundane scenes laying the groundwork for the kidnapping take up far too many chapters. Her other major gaffe is the decision to have the criminal trail lead to a Satanic cult, which remains a hoary literary cliché despite her attempts to explain the still-present threat of Satanism. Cogan has successfully blended Western storytelling with Native American spirituality before, but this book contains too much filler to measure up to the earlier novels. (Mar. 6)