By Chris Bohjalian
(Reviewed by Nancy Jelinek)

The men, one of them wanted for a murder elsewhere, were caught, tried, and sentenced. The attack changed Laurel. After recuperating at home, she returned to college, but she was quiet and withdrawn from almost all of her friends except Talia Rice. She switched from biking to swimming at the college pool and met alumna Katherine Maguire, who runs the local homeless shelter. Laurel had volunteered at the shelter until she graduated and then became an employee. It was at the shelter that she met Bobbie Crocker, newly released from a mental hospital and needing interim housing.

When Bobbie dies, his only belongings—a box of photographs and negatives—end up on Laurel’s desk. They’re interesting pictures, mostly black and white from the 50s or 60s, and some are of well-known people. Laurel is into photography; Katherine would like her to curate a show as publicity for the shelter, to “put a face on the homeless.” Family pictures, found in an envelope, draw Laurel’s attention: she recognizes background buildings as homes near where she grew up on Long Island. The picture that startles her most, though, is that of a woman riding a dirt bike on a road in an area very much like where Laurel was attacked.

The Double Bind is a fascinating story within a story. Laurel takes very seriously her pursuit of the truth behind the photographs, especially the family pictures. She searches out people who might have known something about Bobbie Crocker. Regardless of her great fear, she even meets with one of the men who attacked her, trying to find out how Bobbie Crocker came to be in possession of a picture of her on the road where the attack on her life took place.
 
Other books by Chris Bohjalian include Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, Midwives, and Water Witches.

Vintage Books (a division of Random House, Inc.)
ISBN 978-1-4000-3166-5