The Tutor [Mass Market Paperback]

I have to agree that the characters in the family are mostly pretty flat, but the character of Julian was precisely the sort of misunderstood villain I like to read about. The story started off well, and like a good comic book, I found myself rooting for the bad guy, which is a good sign that either he's not a completely unrealistic bad guy, or the family is just so dull and unlikeable you actually prefer to be in the company of the villain.

After being swept into reading this book at any spare moment, I was tremendously disappointed by the ending. It seemed to me like Abrahams was on his way to writing a story that actually treats its villain with humanity for a change, but the editor got mad at the anti-heroic vagueries of such a plot, and instead ordered him to tack on a generic and uncharacteristic ending straight out of bad Hollywood where the bad guy goes crazy and the dull "innocent" family is only justified in getting rid of him.

On the positive side, the bad writing and underlying themes that even the author apparently did not catch on to served as great inspiration for my own writing, because reading this book couldn't help but make me think that audiences deserve better.

In my view the characters were unlikeable, except for the charming 11-year-old Ruby. This girl basically looks after herself in every way; she cooks her own meals, locks the house up after her, travels alone on her bicycle, etc. This is completely unbelievable and makes her parents look neglectful. They regularly returned home at seven or eight in the evening without checking to make sure she'd got home from school all right or anything! Then there's Brandon, the teenage jerk who needs a tutor because he failed his SAT. To be honest I thought that Brandon was an awful parody of a teenager - he drank, smoked, did crack, skipped school, flunked his exams, had meaningless sex, listened to rap, swore constantly. After all this are we really supposed to sympathize with him? A lot of the families bad behaviour could be justified by the death of the eldest son Adam years ago, and although of course this is a terrible event, I just did not buy that the family could become so dysfunctional just because he had died.

The best bit about the story was Julian - the villain. I liked the parts of the story about him, as he was truly vile and unfeeling. The parts of the book from Ruby's point of view were great as well and very funny in places. It was these moments that kept me reading on avidly despite my vague dislike for Linda, Scott and Brandon.<P

Overall The Tutor kept me in suspense but I have no inclination to read it again (as I do with books that I like) and it leaves me with more questions than answers. My advice is read The Perfect Crime also by Peter Abrahams, which I think is a much better thriller with a great plot.

JoAnne

Which means it's still well worth reading. Fans of Ramsey Campbell's Nazareth Hill should stop here, to meet another plucky adolescent girl who may be the only one clever enough to notice danger as it slowly infects her home (of course any brave child remotely resembling the heroine in Nazareth Hill, and finding herself in similar--but not supernatural--dire straits, is likely to win me over big-time). Fans of Stephen King's Misery should probably meet The Tutor; Peter Abrahams seems to have King's ability to create characters and situations presented in a style that compels you to read on and on and on until the book is suddenly finished (and they both do psychopaths very well, thank you). Fans of...well, heck, either Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band", or Alan Scholefield's forgotten novel Venom (also a forgotten film!), should read The Tutor, if snakes don't actually make you shiver too much, that is. And most of all, fans of something like A Judgement In Stone, by Ruth Rendell, should read this, because Rendell had already proved that you don't need violence in every chapter of a thriller to generate palpable chills.

Iago fans are also invited, to come appreciate Abraham's terrible, tutoring, two-faced villain. Columbo fans...hey, drop in also, to watch eleven-year-old Ruby start to collect the clues that say her family has invited evil into their home. Now that I've invited everyone, I'll stop. But read this book, thriller fans!