UNRELIABLE narrators come in many shapes. There are madmen, mystics, seducers, naïfs - Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, the ghost-prone governess in "The Turn of the Screw" and Poe's self-defeating paranoiac in "The Tell-Tale Heart," for starters. And then there is Dr. Jennifer White, who narrates Alice LaPlante's first novel. By the time "Turn of Mind" begins, she is losing her wits to Alzheimer's disease and is the prime suspect in her best friend's murder. She is as unreliable as they come. Neither of these facts is fully clear to Jennifer, of course. Her illness has forced her to retire from a celebrated career as an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in hands. Amanda O'Toole, her longtime neighbor and confidante, has been found dead in her Chicago brownstone, four of her fingers expertly severed at the joints. Jennifer cannot, or will not, remember whether she killed Amanda. But something nags at her crumbling memory, "something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets." It is a doozy of a set-up: the telltale digits, the amnesiac at large. The unfocused dread that Jennifer feels will linger to the end. But to call "Turn of Mind" a thriller - or a chronicle of illness, or saga of friendship, for that matter - would confine it to a genre it transcends. This is a portrait of an unstable mind, an expansive, expertly wrought imagining of memory's failures and potential. Its grounding landmark is the house on the leafy street where Jennifer has lived for decades, three doors down from her murdered friend. We see Jennifer there before the murder; after it, in a Purgatory-like assisted-living facility; and during a brief escape, when she roams, barefoot, through a sultry Chicago night. A coda will answer much of the mystery. By then, the telling has shifted to a nameless third-person narrator, Jennifer too far gone to speak. Through it all, Jennifer's house remains a kind of compass - the focal point of past family life, and half of the local universe she shared with Amanda. At night, out of reflex, she wanders between their homes, puzzled by the police tape lining her friend's empty living room. A small cast of characters drifts into and out of the narrative. Jennifer's 29-year-old son, Mark, a lawyer with "dark hair, dark eyes, a dark aura," comes by to visit and, sheepishly and furtively, to borrow money. In clouded moments, she takes him for her late husband; in others she regards him with a stranger's indifference: "This-man-who-they-say-is-my-son settles himself in the blue armchair near the window in the living room. He loosens his tie, stretches out his legs, makes himself at home." Her 24-year-old daughter, Fiona, a tenure-track professor of economics with a rattlesnake tattoo, seems a better ally. "Her I trust. My Fiona. She places paper after paper in front of me, and I sign without reading." Seeming, though, is all there is in this mental hall of mirrors. If no one is quite what they seem, it is because everyone - and everything - is variable to Jennifer. She keeps a notebook in which she and others record the daily events of her life. The notebook is meant to be a reality check amidst her swirling dementia. But it becomes its own sort of fiction, as open to manipulation as Jennifer is. Among the entries are conflicting notes from Mark and Fiona, each casting doubt on the other's intentions. Although Amanda never makes a live appearance, she emerges, finally, in clearer relief than anyone else. At times, the slightest trigger sends the past rushing in, and Jennifer remembers days like the one they spent at the beach with their husbands and children, the adults eating sandy ham sandwiches and drinking too much wine. At Amanda's insistence, the conversation goes a step too far, and its revelations will have lasting consequences for Jennifer. These lucid flashbacks reveal the extent of her friend's subtle treachery. Alzheimer's is bleak territory, and to saddle Jennifer with suspected murder seems cruel and unusual punishment But in LaPlante's vivid prose, her waning mind proves a prism instead of a prison, her memory refracted to rich, sensual effect. There are moments of steely, surgical calm, the language tight and fractured: "The colors were wrong," she thinks, staring at a pile of pills. "The bright liquid and the small hard round bursts of blue, magenta, buttercup. Poison. I would not be fooled." AND there are moments of blooming, antic poetry, as when she first bursts out of the assisted-living facility into the sweltering summer: "Overpowering heat, the air thick and foul-smelling from the fumes of softened asphalt under your feet. It gives as you step, makes a dark, sucking sound with each move. Like walking on a tarry moon." LaPlante, a veteran teacher of writing and the author of the aptly titled "Method and Madness: The Making of a Story," has imagined that lunatic landscape well. The twists and turns of mind this novel charts are haunting and original. Losing her wits to dementia, Alice LaPlante's heroine is the prime suspect in her best friends murder. Zoë Slutzky has written for Bookforum, The Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones.

*Starred Review* Part literary novel, part thriller, LaPlante's haunting first novel traces the deterioration of orthopedic surgeon Jennifer White, who at 64 is suffering severe dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. Told entirely from her viewpoint, this is an often startling portrait of a fiercely intelligent woman struggling mightily to hold on to her sense of self. As her lucidity waxes and wanes, her dire circumstances increasingly come to light. Her husband has recently died, and she lives with a caretaker in her handsome house on Chicago's North Side. She has two children who seem to be battling over her money. Most distressing, her best friend, Amanda O'Toole, has just been murdered, her body found in her home with four fingers surgically removed. Now the police consider Jennifer a person of interest, and even Jennifer herself does not know whether she killed Amanda. It appears their friendship was a difficult one, marred by frequent arguments, and Jennifer's seemingly happy marriage was full of secrets and betrayal, all of which Amanda seemed to know about. This masterfully written debut is fascinating on so many levels, from its poignant and inventive depiction of a harrowing illness to its knowing portrayal of the dark complexities of friendship and marriage.--Wilkinson, Joann. Copyright 2010 Booklist

LaPlante's impressive first novel sensitively explores the mental disintegration of widowed 64-year-old Jennifer White, a once-lauded Chicago hand surgeon, who charts her own experiences with Alzheimer's both consciously, in notes she writes to herself and thoughts she shares, and unconsciously, as she records conversations and actions she witnesses but doesn't understand. When someone fatally bludgeons Jennifer's best friend, 75-year-old Amanda O'Toole, who lives just three doors away, suspicion falls on Jennifer because the killer surgically removed four fingers from Amanda's right hand. In a satisfying twist, Jennifer honestly doesn't know herself whether she committed the murder. Jennifer's 29-year-old lawyer son, Mark, wishes to have his mother declared mentally incompetent, while her 24-year-old daughter, Fiona, a sweet, loving flake, and her full-time caretaker, Magdalena, act out of less selfish motives. Mystery fans should be prepared for a subtle literary novel in which the unfolding of Jennifer's condition and of her past matters far more than the whodunit. 16-city author tour. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

LaPlante's literary novel explores uncharted territory, imagining herself into a mind, one slipping, fading, spinning away from her protagonist, a woman who may have murdered her best friend. Dr. Jennifer White lives in the dark, shadowy forest of forgetfulness. She is 64, a flinty intellectual, competent and career-focused, but she has been forced to retire from orthopedic surgery by the onset of dementia. Her husband is dead. Her childrenprecociously intelligent and possibly bipolar Fiona, a professor, and Mark, an attorney like his late father, but only an imitation of that charismatic and competent manare left to engineer her care. The novel opens with White at home, cared for by Magdalena, a paid companion. Fiona has control of her mother's finances, a source of conflict with Mark, troubled by money problems and the hint of addiction. White's own strobe flashes of lucidity reveal the family's history. White's closest friend, Amanda, was found dead a few days previously, a thing she sometimes understands. Four fingers from one of Amanda's hand had been surgically amputated. Amanda, her husband Peter and Jennifer and James were close friends, but Amanda possessed an arrogant streak, a hyper-moralistic and judgmental attitude, aggravated by a willingness to use secrets to manipulate. Amanda was also childless and jealous, especially of Fiona's affections. LaPlante tells the story poignantly, gracefully and artistically. Jennifer White, as a physician, as a wife, as a mother, leaps from the pages as a powerful character, one who drifts away from all that is precious to herher profession, her mental acuitywith acceptance, anger and intermittent tragic self-knowledge. LaPlante writes in scenes without chapter breaks. White's thoughts and speech are presented in plain text and those of the people she encounters in italics. Despite the near stream-of-consciousness, FaulknerianSound and Furypresentation, the narrative is easily followed to the resolution of the mystery and White's ultimate melancholy and inevitable end. A haunting story masterfully told.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Amanda O'Toole has been murdered and four of her fingers were surgically removed. The police suspect the victim's best friend, Dr. Jennifer White, but Jennifer is suffering from Alzheimer's and has no idea whether or not she committed the murder. Most of the time she doesn't even realize her friend is dead. VERDICT This is an ingenious mystery with a highly unreliable narrator. Full of twists and turns, it will keep fans of Before I Go To Sleep and Gone Girl guessing right up to the end. (LJ 3/1/11) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.