Ill Wind From Nebraska: Review

[Susan Taylor Chehak], whose first novel, "The Story of Annie D." (an Edgar Award nominee), won praise not only for its murder-story component but also for the author's gifts as a psychologist, family chronicler and tragedian, would seem to be a logical candidate for crossover status. For some, her second book, "Harmony," will only confirm this judgment. The book's structure is that of a fugue. Clodine, the willful, passionate heroine, is played off contrapuntally against her placid, conventional sister, Jewel. The sisters' differences are traced to their relationship with their quirky, idiosyncratic father, a traveling salesman who has always favored Clodine, but whose affections carry a strong element of possessiveness as well. Simultaneously reveling in her father's adoration and rebelling against it, Clodine stages a revolt that leads first to physical injury, and then to a disastrous marriage. Ms. Chehak's precise, crystalline style prevents any intrusion of bathos and makes possible such adroit effects as Clodine's description of the "tender purple flowers that were blooming on my thigh" and which "spread out upon the surface of my skin in the unmistakable shape of the palm side of [Galen Wheeler]'s hard hand."