ORIGIN
Diana Abu-Jaber
W. W. Norton & Company
Thriller
ISBN-10: 0393064557
ISBN-13: 9780393064551

Lena Dawson is a fingerprint examiner and technician in Syracuse, New York. She is accosted one day at work by a young grieving mother named Erin Cogan. Erin's baby boy, Matthew, has died. The police call it a crib death, but Erin is convinced it was murder. The more she insists, the more she comes off as hysterical, even to Lena. Still, Lena has a surreal moment when she feels that she has known and forgotten Erin. What is the connection?

Everyone recognizes that Lena sometimes has a sixth sense about cases. She occasionally touches a piece of evidence and instantly knows who committed a crime and why. Although she has no particular intuition about Erin's baby yet, she is aware that there have been more local crib deaths recently.

The confrontation with the young mother somehow triggers memories of her life with her foster parents, Pia and Henry McWilliams. Pia and Henry took Lena in at age two and were vague about where she came from. Lena always believed that questioning them would lead to danger, but she has wondered why they didn't adopt her. Little Lena made some startling claims (which, as an adult, she continues to believe are true): She once lived in a rain forest where an ape mothered her. As a little girl, when she saw a Tarzan movie on TV, she insisted that an ape in the film was her mother. Pia confirmed her young foster daughter's story with the orphanage nuns, telling Lena that an American rescued her as a baby from the jungle ape who was nurturing her. That knowledge changes everything for Lena as a young girl, setting her apart from all other humans.

Now Lena wonders about the recent rise in SIDS deaths in the area. Nothing about Matthew’s situation seems remarkable, except for his mother's certainty that her baby was murdered. His case is reopened and Lena is called to the scene. She half-fears and half-hopes that she will have a breakthrough and solve the case. The detective volunteering to drive her to the Cogan house, Keller Duseky, asks her out but also seems terrified of her. Lena soon feels frightened herself because what she senses in the baby's nursery leads her to the conclusion that there is a serial baby killer on the loose. Even more startling, she realizes that her quest to track down the culprit is personal --- if she finds out what happened to these babies, she believes she will unlock mysteries about her own childhood. In fact, she has no choice but to plunge into the mystery, as the plot takes one dark turn after another, ramping up the tension.

Initially, I was put off by the premise of Lena's jungle background, but as I was drawn into the story (it didn't take long before I was totally obsessed by this "can't put it down" multi-layered literary thriller), it felt less preposterous and distracting. It seems remarkably courageous for Diana Abu-Jaber to give her character memories of a rain forest and an ape mother. It is so eminently mockable --- and yet, it works. The author's descriptive powers put the reader into the freezing winter of Syracuse and into Lena's mind as well. The chill pervades the plot with a sense of icy, creepy foreboding that is hard to shake.

   --- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (terryms2001@yahoo.com)

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