Long Drive Home

February 28, 2011
Allison follows What You Have Left with a tight drama, part psychological thriller, part tragedy. Glen is an accountant living in New Jersey with his successful wife, Liz, and their six-year-old daughter, Sara. On an ordinary drive home from school, a series of mundane decisions grow increasingly dire and culminate in a car accident that sets road-raging Glen onto a path of deception and self-destruction. The novel is told from Glen's perspective, in part through a confessional letter written to Sara, an obvious but nonetheless effective tension builder. It's a slow burn as guilt chips away at Glen's sanity and his marriage crumbles, his impotent angst finds an unlikely outlet, and he comes under ever more scrutiny by a strangely motivated detective. Allison's triumph is the skillful rendering of Glen's transformation as a basically good guy whose fatal flaw leads him to a cataclysmically stupid decision. And while other characters fare less well—the cop on Glen's tail is straight out of an airport thriller, and Liz isn't given the chance to break through her mercenary and fundamentally unpleasant mold—Allison's effortless prose and playful genre mixing showcase a burgeoning talent.

April 15, 2011
In his second novel, Allison probes one familys inner dynamics after a series of hasty, ultimately disastrous decisions leads inexorably to its unraveling. A seemingly mundane drive home from school, with six-year-old Sara chattering away in the back seat, turns into a nightmare when Glen Bauer lets his anger at a reckless teenage driver turn vengeful, causing an accident resulting in the 18-year-olds death across the street from the Bauer home. Allison follows Glens thought processes as he neglects to tell the police or his wife all the details leading up to the accident, including his initial sighting of the young driver speeding through his neighborhood and his wish to scare him, then keeps Sara from talking to the police, fearing that she knows more than shes letting on and is instinctively trying to protect her father. Allison portrays Glens string of bad choices as an unrelenting whirlpool, sucking him down until he has nowhere to escape, as the reader wishes in vain that he would stop and think rationally before he compounds his mistakes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)