Dry Ice

(Dutton, 401 pages)

DR. Alan Gregory’s life is a mess, but things are about to get a lot worse.For starters, he and his wife Lauren aren’t getting along, partly because Alan has been pressuring her to have a second child. He feels bad about being a nag, especially with her multiple sclerosis acting up again.

And his Boulder, Colorado, psychology practice has been failing ever since one of his patients went nuts and got himself shot by the cops on national TV (Kill Me, 2006).

It would help if Alan and Lauren could talk, but because of their jobs, they can’t even share those normal “how’s your day?” chats.

Alan is bound by the ethics of his profession not to talk about his patients — especially with a wife who is also a prosecutor. Lauren is heading a grand jury investigation that she’s bound by law not to talk about — not even with her husband.

When one of Lauren’s grand jury witnesses goes missing and traces of her blood turn up in Alan’s office, husband and wife can’t talk to each other about at<$> without lawyers present. Soon, Alan gets the feeling that his wife and his best friend, a cop named Sam, consider him a suspect.

Just when Alan thinks he’s hit bottom, he learns that one of his former patients, a dangerous psychopath named Michael McClellan, has escaped from the Colorado state mental hospital.

That’s the premise for Dry Ice, the 15th book in Stephen White’s series of page-turners featuring Dr. Alan Gregory.

White has recycled the villainom Privileged Information (1991), his very first Alan Gregory novel. In that one, McClellan tried to kill Alan, Lauren and Sam and then pleaded insanity. Alan knew McClellan was more evil than crazy, but his ethics prevented him from saying so, and McClellan ended up in a hospital instead of prison.

There, White tells us in Dry Ice, McClellan has spent 16 years, plotting another attempt on Alan and his family. And now he’s loose.

The story bogs down in the beginning as White spends a lot of time rehashing this back story in a plodding style that feels like a 30-page versiof a Star Wars <$>scroll.

Even at his best, White is no great stylist, his prose barely a cut above the hack work of Dan Brown and John Grisham. But when the action picks up, the story has even more twists and turns than readers are accustomed to from this thriller writer who has produced ten New York Times best-sellers.

White strives to make the book work on two levels: action-packed crime story and psychological drama.

He touches on all the secrets the characters are trying to keep: Lauren is concealing her health problem from her bosses; Sam knows he could get fired if it becomes known that he’s having an affair with a crime victim; Lauren and Alan are keeping very big secrets about their past lives from each other.

White wants the reader to appreciate how corrosive those secrets are to the people trying to conceal them.

A practising clinical psychologist before he became a novelist,

White really cares about this stuff; yet oddly, he handles the crime story better than the psychological drama, which feels a bit contrived.