When children commit horrible crimes, they usually seem to vanish from sight, instantly ushered away out of either respect or shame. But is it a good thing to lock pre-adolescent perpetrators away to live with the lingering memories of their horrible acts? Can kids outrun the tragic childhood that determined the course of their lives? Pat Barker's Border Crossing may seem to offer a fashionable take on the debate, but she digs deeper than most didactic op-ed pieces by portraying the discussion not only from the inside, but also from two different but equally illustrative vantages. Walking with his estranged, soon-to-be-ex-wife, psychologist Tom Seymour witnesses a young man's attempted suicide, and risks his own life to rescue him from a frigid river. In an overly convenient coincidence, Seymour visits the victim at the hospital and recognizes the 23-year-old as Danny Miller, whom Seymour helped convict of a murder 13 years earlier. Perhaps against his better judgement, he starts to see Miller half-professionally, trying to determine whether Miller, hidden from the public's hateful gaze by a new identity, is truly the innocent he had always professed to be, or the psychotic little Lecter most consider him. Parker keeps ratcheting up the suspense of her story, interrupting Seymour and Miller's tense sessions with Seymour's own potential midlife crisis, which in its own way parallels Miller's problems with his past. But though several of Seymour's colleagues warn him about the young man, who has an uncanny ability to turn the tables of any relationship to his favor, he can't shake his desire to get to the dark heart of the one-time killer, who clearly understands more than he lets on. As with Barker's last novel, Another World, the buildup is more impressive than the payoff, but the sessions that propel the plot are invariably gripping, with Seymour's attempts to assemble the pieces of Miller's enigmatic life provoking curiosity and terror in reader and protagonist alike. Barker has set up her story so skillfully that it has no choice but to move forward at an insistent clip, in search of the regrettable deeds and horrible facts that memories often cloud.