Books: Straight Scotch

HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS (187 pp.)— James Kennaway—Atheneum ($4).

The wife is imaginative and beautiful. The husband is decent though somewhat priggish and admits that "sex was never my strong subject." The other man is a brilliant scientist who is also a cad and a workmanlike seducer. These characters might result in a story as obvious and predictable as any triangle, but with a special kind of emotional geometry, Scottish Author James Kennaway has arrived at a taut, arresting and convincing novel.

Lovely Mary, the wife, is, as her brother Pink observes, "the most vulnerable thing on two legs." Since her husband has in...

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