Harm's Way » (Abridged, 5 CDs, 6 hrs.)

Writers often use elements of their own personalities to craft their most-enduring characters, and Stephen White has certain done so in creating fellow-clinical psychologist Dr. Alan Gregory. However, White s electrifying series of crime thrillers aren t likely to be mistaken for autobiographies anytime soon.

When Dr. Alan Gregory's good friend Peter Arvin is found bloody and dying on the stage of a Colorado theatre, suspicion soars that he has become the second victim of a killer whose first prey was discovered amid the elaborate scenery of the road company's production of the Broadway show Miss Saigon. Alan is immediately asked to respond to two pleas for help: one from the police, who would like a psychological profile of the murderer, and one from Peter's widow, who is desperate to know the meaning of her dead husband's secrets.

As Alan struggles to cope with the complexities of his new marriage and the shattering personal consequences of his friend's murder, provocative clues lead him down a trail that winds from the Front Range of the Rockies to the casinos of the Colorado high country and finally to the grandeur outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

His journey takes him deep into Peter's past and inevitably toward the discovery of harrowing truths about the human heart - about the struggle for survival and the quest for forgiveness - that seem always just out of his reach, obscured by the smoke of a long-forgotten fire.

Publishers Weekly

The extravagantly showy murder of a very private man opens White's engrossing fourth story about Colorado psychologist Alan Gregory (following Higher Authority). Alan's friend and neighbor, Peter Arvin, a skilled woodworker and solo mountain climber, is found tortured and bleeding to death on top of a grand piano on the stage of the Boulder Theatre. After Peter dies at the hospital where his wife, Adrienne, is a urologist, police detective Sam Purdy asks Alan to work up an informal profile of the killer to see whether it matches that of the person being sought for a similar murder in Denver. Complying with Adrienne's desire to be able to tell her young son, Jason, more about his father, Alan also investigates Peter's past. These linked efforts, soon complicated by a third theater murder in a nearby town, call on the full reach of Alan's professional skills and lead him into unexpected territory, psychological and geographic. He visits Jackson, Wyo., to find out from Peter's family about a forest fire Peter experienced as a young man, and he encounters danger at the construction site of a Colorado casino where more murders are discovered. All the while, he observes the relationships of others-Peter and Adrienne's unique marriage; the attraction of the woman cop in charge of the Denver murder to Sam Purdy; his own attraction to Jason Arvin's young nanny-through the lens of his love for his new ( and second) wife, Lauren, an assistant DA who makes some cogent observations of her own about the crimes. White, a psychologist, informs this intricate tale with convincing emotion. (Mar.)