At a time when screenwriters are routinely doctored and arbitrated out of existence, Michael Tolkin possesses one of the few distinctive voices in the trade. His strong vision presses insistently beyond the page, making unusual demands of the filmmakers who take on his material. His scripts for Deep Cover, Changing Lanes, The Player (based on his novel), and The Rapture (which he also directed) center on characters mired in serious moral and/or spiritual quandaries, but rarely equipped to wrest themselves loose. Having skated through life without purpose or direction, they suddenly find themselves confronted by the grim consequences of their sins, and they can't always locate the path to redemption. Never one to shy away from unsympathetic heroes, Tolkin creates his most smugly despicable protagonist to date in Under Radar, his ambitious and maddeningly elusive third novel. Living off the fat of a brilliant insurance scam, Tom Levy successfully plays the part of a loving husband and father to his wife Rosalie and his two children, obscuring an inner life consumed by dark secrets and disturbing obsessions. As the book opens, Tom and his family are settling into an extended vacation at a sexless Jamaican resort, where he allays his boredom and contempt by drifting into voyeuristic fantasy. Training his gaze on an attractive mother whom he considers intriguing by virtue of her reading material (Jane Austen instead of beach paperbacks), he follows her around, inventing fictional scenarios about her for his private amusement. But fantasy bleeds into reality at a dance party, where Tom decides his 4-year-old daughter has been encouraged to thrust provocatively to the music, egged on by his fantasy woman's portly husband. Tom's stunning act of revenge earns him a life sentence in a seedy Kingston prison, where he emerges from a Rip Van Winkle-like trance to come to grips with his starving conscience. Just as Tom's life is clearly divided in two by his prison stay, Under Radar reads like two novellas smashed together: the first a chilling and misanthropic meditation on evil, the second an obscure brush with the spiritual. For all the integrity and daring of this leap of faith, the latter segment sacrifices a carefully constructed story for a long-winded Biblical allegory that makes Tom seem more remote than ever. An unerringly brave writer, Tolkin has taken giant risks before, but with Under Radar, he flies clear off the rails.