Author Stephen J. Cannell explains, in his Acknowledgments at the beginning of At First Sight, that he came up with the idea for the book while reading Andrew Klavan’s interesting and risk-taking novel, Man and Wife. He decided he needed to take some risks of his own in novel-writing, and so sat down to write a book different from his usual output. The result is nothing like Man and Wife, but it’s entertaining (and valuable, I think) in its own way.

The main character and primary narrator is Chick Best, a California dot com millionaire. He has a beautiful home, expensive cars, a beautiful wife and daughter. At first he seems a decent, amusing guy, too, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But gradually the picture darkens. His business is on the downslide, and he blames everyone but himself. He’s sick of his wife, and his daughter is a disaster waiting to happen (he never wonders why). He’s living far beyond his means, desperately trying to sustain the exterior trappings and the envy of others that, he imagines, are all that make life worthwhile.

While on a vacation in Hawaii, he and his wife meet Paige Ellis and her husband, and Chick is bowled over. Paige is naturally beautiful and sweet, in a way that his wife, for all her expensive physical training, can’t match. After they return to their separate homes, Chick can’t stop obsessing about Paige.

When he makes a business trip to New York City and finds himself with time on his hands, he finds his rented car moving (almost without his volition, he would like us to believe) south to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Paige and her husband live.

And there he commits a vile crime, and his life—and the lives of his family and the Ellises—are changed forever.

At First Sight is a moral tale, a story focused on character (and its lack). It could even be seen as a Christian story of a kind, because of the way it strips off the outer skin of a superficially pleasant man, to reveal the monster lurking below. In what might be a hat-tip to Andrew Klavan (though Klavan wasn’t entirely converted yet when he wrote Man and Wife), one of the book’s most admirable characters is an old cop who carries a Bible wherever he goes, so he can share its words with those who grieve, a man whose life is about service to others.

I’ll not deny that the book left me with a queasy feeling. But the queasy feeling came from being forced to examine my own selfishness and superficiality; to ask what evil I might be capable of, if my personal obsessions ever found opportunity.

I recommend it, with the usual cautions for language and adult themes.