Public Service

By John Skow

Richie Arias is a societal malignancy, a weak, charming, tirelessly manipulative man who inspires thoughts of therapeutic homicide in almost everyone who knows him. We met him a couple of years ago in Richard North Patterson's crisp courtroom drama, Degree of Guilt. There he was a minor character, the shiftless, sponging husband of the heroine, attorney Terri Peralta. Since then Richie has metastasized, and in Patterson's new legal thriller, Eyes of a Child (Knopf; 590 pages; $25), his rottenness drives the action. His psychology is that of an exceedingly clever stalker, and after Terri moves out with their six-year-old daughter Elena, his obsession is to prove that she can't break free.

In fact when, a few chapters into the new novel, Richie is found deservedly dead with a pistol in his hand, his grip on the lives of Terri and her daughter does seem to tighten. Nobody believes that Richie would have been public spirited enough to commit suicide. Some very unsympathetic cops sniff around Terri and her family and finally arrest her new lover, an upstanding lawyer and senatorial candidate whose 15-year-old son the corrupt Richie had smeared with phony charges that he molested Terri's little girl.

The court battle that follows begins with several yards of authentic- sounding , cynical maneuvering in the sleazy process of jury selection and ends, hundreds of pages later, with the question of who actually plugged Richie still disturbingly unresolved. Chiefly because of its villain, the novel is a chilling success. It is also overlong by half and lumbered with a few more plot elements than it needs -- most notably a political feud involving the accused would-be Senator. But the author's characterizations are tough and believable, and his sentences, which tended to wander through purple patches in his first novels, now are spare and efficient. A similar spareness in plotting might have helped matters. What's clear is that after half a dozen books, Patterson is one of the best in the business.