Stranger in the Room by Amanda Kyle Williams

Published by Bantam on August 21, 2012 

My reaction to Stranger in the Room is similar to my assessment of The Stranger You Seek: an enjoyable read that falls well short of greatness. In common with the first Keye Street novel, the story occasionally has an engaging, playful quality and the characters are fun. When it tries to be a serious thriller, however, Stranger in the Room suffers from many of the problems that marred the first novel.

In addition to Keye Street, two characters who played critical roles in The Stranger You Seek return in the encore. Street's computer whiz helper, a stoner named Neil Donovan, shows up from time to time to provide comic relief. Street's boyfriend, homicide lieutenant Aaron Rauser, is investigating the murder of a child. Street, of course, becomes embroiled in that mystery.

The novel's other significant storyline involves Street's troubled cousin. Miki Ashton is off her meds but she isn't cutting or overdosing. Her current problem is a stalker who, we soon learn, is also a killer. Street needs to keep her safe and find the killer. The odds of a connection between the two cases are, of course, infinitesimal, but in the world of thrillers, coincidence is commonplace. Unfortunately, the stalker/killer is more a collection of buzz words than a believable character.

As was true in the first novel, some of the best (and funniest) moments involve the mundane aspects of Street's job, including picking up a bail jumper who has weaponized his boogers. Unfortunately, another assignment -- one that occupies several chapters -- adds little value to the novel. Street is hired to investigate a crematory operator after a family receives an urn filled with cement mix and chicken feed. Apart from being less interesting than the central plot, this storyline is awfully far-fetched. It doesn't deserve the degree of drama that Amanda Kyle Williams tries to attach to it.

To flesh out her characterization of Street, Williams delves into the circumstances of Street's adoption and devotes some scenes to Street's interaction with her adoptive parents. Despite the pop psychology overtones (Street's mother feeds feral cats, giving her an opportunity to demonstrate love without getting too close to its recipient, just as she did with her adopted children), the story does manage to advance the reader's understanding of Street's personality.

Several aspects of the novel are problematic, including a chapter in which Street, calling upon the profiling skills that supposedly allow a profiler to "see" everything a killer did while preparing for the murder, finds a clue that only the stupidest of killers would have left behind. This is the stuff of mundane television crime shows, not carefully constructed thrillers. On other occasions, Street relies on glib insights to feed her assumptions about the killer's motivations. The notion that Street could actually find the killer based on her vague and generalized profile is the product of wishful thinking rather than the reality of profiling (in the real world, profilers are more often wrong than right). The psychological profiling that was (fortunately) underplayed in The Stranger You Seek is given a more significant role in Stranger in the Room, and the novel is weaker for it.

Street's temptation to renew her love affair with alcohol leads to more than one trite moment, and the frequent reminders that she's a recovering alcoholic become tiresome. Only slightly less wearying is Street's tendency to define herself as a victim because her grandparents were murdered thirty years earlier. A lifetime of self-pity does not an appealing protagonist make.

Williams occasionally tries to add hip humor to her story with gratuitous celebrity bashing. If anyone reads this novel twenty years from now, they'll probably wonder who Anna Nicole Smith and Lindsay Lohan were. I'm not a fan of either celebrity, but I'm also not a fan of cheap shots. Given the sympathetic attention Williams pays to Street's alcohol addiction, snarky jokes about addicted celebrities seem misplaced.

Setting all of those qualms aside, Stranger in the Room has sufficient merit to earn a lukewarm recommendation. The story moves quickly, the supporting characters are strong, and the ending, although predictable, is reasonably satisfying.

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