SHE HAD IT COMING

By Mary Monroe (Dafina, 320 pages, $24)

Rarely do those bones hidden in the back of the coat closet stay there to collect dust and be long forgotten. No, eventually they come back to bite you, as Delores Reese finds out in this gritty urban drama.

The main character is a master at hiding secrets. She witnessed her best friend, Valerie, murder her wife-beating stepfather, and she's a bigamist. Valerie helps Delores keep her secret because she knows her own could send her to prison.

The two best friends battle with greed, envy and lust until the whole mess explodes in their faces.

Although the gory details of domestic abuse are the realities of some, the ending is only halfway believable. Valerie winds up in prison, while Delores magically lands her dream job in another state and goes on to live happily ever after.

MELISSA WALKER, CALENDAR WRITER


THE BOY IN THE BOX: THE UNSOLVED CASE OF AMERICA'S UNKNOWN CHILD

By David Stout (Lyons Press, 255 pages, $16.95 paperback)

"The Boy in the Box," the story of the decades-long search to find the identity and killer of a small blond boy whose broken body was stuffed into a cardboard box and dumped in woods near Philadelphia in 1957, is an exceptionally fine true-crime story. In lesser hands, it could have been nothing but a tawdry horror show.

But Stout, a veteran New York Times reporter, artfully conveys the heart-of-darkness nature of the crime, the psyches of the detectives who made solving it their life work and the possible explanations for what happened, many of which have been proven to be dead ends.

One theory, neither proven nor disproven, put forth by a woman who says her outwardly respectable parents bought the child and then tortured him in their cellar, is so nightmarish that you, like Stout and the detectives, will hope it isn't what happened.

Adding to the book's haunting quality are its many photographs, including some of the boy's body and face that, when printed on a flier in 1957, so deeply affected some children that they later became cops. If only their doing so would have helped prevent the kind of evil this story ponders.

PAMELA MILLER, NIGHT METRO EDITOR