Derailed (James Siegel)

I first saw Derailed at Sam’s, but it didn’t look quite good enough to merit buying, so I waited until the library had it. Boy, was I wrong. Siegel has produced a sucker-punch of a novel. Charlie Schine is a Manhattan adman with a strained marriage and a diabetic teenage daughter. In a slow progression of bad judgment, he flirts with, then has an affair with, a beautiful woman he meets on the commuter train, but when their liason is interrupted by an armed rapist-turned-blackmailer, his life goes to hell at amazing speed. Pretty soon, he’s separated from his wife, estranged from his daughter, broke, and unemployed, but then things start looking up again. This book surprised me at several key plot points, even though I’m an inveterate thriller reader and am rarely surprised. The only real quibble I have is with a blatant deus ex machina escape about three quarters of the way through the book, but all in all, I’m able to forgive Siegel this flaw because of the velocity and force of the rest of the book. Highly recommended.