Overview

“Written with Caputo’s customary style and razor-sharp prose, Equation for Evil is the rarest of novels: one that makes the reader think profoundly at the same time that he is driven to devour pages. Unflinching, compelling and engaging, it stands beside books like Presumed Innocent or The Silence of the Lambs and is equally fascinating.” -- John Banville From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Book Award finalist Philip Caputo, a timely thriller that is sure to have you on the edge of your seat On a quiet morning in California, a lone gunman opens fire on a busload of children headed for a field trip, then turns the gun on himself. Forensic psychiatrist Leander Heartwood and special agent Gabriel Chin team up to investigate the case, seeking at first only to solve this single disturbing crime but in time delving into issues of race, morality, and the complex forces at work in all horrifying acts of violence. Part mystery, part psychological thriller, part piercing social commentary, Equation for Evil is a riveting and incisive meditation on violence and the nature of evil.

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9780060984113

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"""Written with Caputo's customary style and razor-sharp prose, Equation for Evil is the rarest of novels: one that makes the reader think profoundly at the same time that he is driven to devour pages. Unflinching, compelling and engaging, it stands beside books like Presumed Innocent or The Silence of the Lambs and is equally fascinating."" -- John Banville ""A white-knuckle thriller replete with violent racist conspiracies, kinky sex, and a cool twist for an ending."" -- Esquire"

Despite the recent success of Mary Willis Walker's Under the Beetle's Cellar (p. 818) and Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave (p. 965), this interminable inquest into a similar crime - a crazed gunman's assault on a busful of schoolchildren - suggests that no suspense formula is foolproof. This is not, repeat not, a criminal investigation, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Leander Heartwood tells his unwilling partner, Special Agent Gabriel Chin, of the California Department of Justice. But their assignment - to compile a psychological autopsy that will explain why Duane Boggs opened fire on a field trip to Sutter's Mill, killing 14 of 26 mostly Asian-American students - sounds just like that, especially after evidence indicates that Boggs, who seemed incapable of planning this kind of crime anyway, had help killing himself at the scene. After a survey of Boggs's few friends, a dalliance with the KKK and the White Aryan Resistance, and a brief look at Boggs's kinky kid brother Duane Tipton, Heartwood and Chin settle on Boggs's coworker Mace Weathers as his most likely accomplice. Though Weathers, a Mormon weight-lifter who lost an eye in defending his own Asian girlfriend against a bunch of skinheads, doesn't seem to fit the profile of the coolheaded bigot they're after, Heartwood and Chin battle the cliches - their squabbles over tuff and procedure, the frequent switches to Weathers's point of view, the reverential tone toward psychological profiling, which you'd swear had never been used by any actual or fictional detectives before - to spring a trap on Weathers, who's planning an encore with another cat's-paw. But without the uncertainty that's lost in all those closeups of Weathers, there's not much suspense, and even less originality, to their game of cat and mouse. All the size and sweep you'd expect from Caputo (Means of Escape, 1991, etc.), but hurt by his lack of familiarity with the conventions of a genre he seems to think he's invented himself. (Kirkus Reviews)

A white-knuckle thriller replete with violent racist conspiracies, kinky sex, and a cool twist for an ending.--Esquire Written with Caputo's customary style and razor-sharp prose, Equation for Evil is the rarest of novels: one that makes the reader think profoundly at the same time that he is driven to devour pages. Unflinching, compelling and engaging, it stands beside books like Presumed Innocent or The Silence of the Lambs and is equally fascinating. --John Banville

Written with Caputo's customary style and razor-sharp prose, Equation for Evil is the rarest of novels: one that makes the reader think profoundly at the same time that he is driven to devour pages. Unflinching, compelling and engaging, it stands beside books like Presumed Innocent or The Silence of the Lambs and is equally fascinating. -- John Banville A white-knuckle thriller replete with violent racist conspiracies, kinky sex, and a cool twist for an ending. -- Esquire

Author Information

Philip Caputo is the author of fifteen books, including the classic Vietnam War memoir A Rumor of War and the novel Horn of Africa, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book is The Longest Road. As a journalist, Caputo won the Pulitzer Prize and has published work in the New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, and National Geographic, among other publications.

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