Books: Smothered Incident

THE TRACK OF THE CAT (404 pp.)— Walter Van Tilburg Clark—Random House ($3.50).

Nine years ago, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, an overworked schoolteacher in upstate New York, bowled over the nation's critics with his first novel, a precision-built tour de force called The Ox-Bow Incident. Its firm, restrained handling of the problem of good and evil arising from a mob lynching crowned Clark with the halo of great promise. Five years later came The City of Trembling Leaves, a long, rambling study of sensitive youth in Reno, Nev., which made readers wonder if Ox-Bow...