Prime Suspect.(A Person of Interest )(Book review)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

The improbable hero of Susan Choi's gripping new novel is guilty of many things--except the crime he's been accused of.

I'm interested in the everyman, someone like you or me subjected to extraordinary pressures that in this day and age don't seem so extraordinary, now that there are all these intrusions into our private lives," says Susan Choi, sitting in her sunlit Brooklyn apartment, her ten-day-old son Elliot cradled in one elbow. "When you're accused of doing something you haven't done, the first impulse is to feel guilt or unease. Anyone under those circumstances would start behaving badly."

Choi's enthralling, ripped-from-the-headlines new novel, A Person of Interest (Viking), centers on an Asian-American mathematics professor--"an exotic prince of the Far East, a Yul Brynner with hair"--marooned at a Midwestern university. Following the Una-bomber-like mail-bombing of a hotshot young colleague, the prickly, socially tone-deaf Lee, whose isolation and volatility ignite a plume of suspicion, finds his job in jeopardy and TV vans parked on his lawn. "You're a Person of Interest, and you'll stop being that if you'll stop being so interesting," an FBI agent tells him.

As the thriller-like plot unfolds, it turns out that, though innocent of the crime, Lee is anything but blameless. Not only was he bitterly jealous of the victim, he's avoided by his students, estranged from his daughter, and unloved by his neighbors. And then there's the arrival of a mysterious letter: Seemingly penned by an old rival, it sparks the attention of investigators--and summons regrettable memories of Lee's fragile first wife, Aileen, who appears in flashback as a young mother in what are the novel's most affecting scenes ...