Boy A

In Luton, England Boy A and Boy B were convicted of murdering a young girl Angela Milton. Being teens there names were suppressed and their sentence relatively short for the heinous crime they committed. A decade later Boy A is freed and uses Jack Burridge as his new name; a fight in the bar gives him the nickname "Bruiser". His probation officer Uncle Terry arranges a place to live for Jack and finds the young man a job as a map reader. As Boy A, Jack learned how to survive brutal incarceration by fitting in and being amiable with everyone. He is doing well until he begins an affair with a woman at work at the same time the media announces Boy A is free to kill again. Although the alphabetizing of each subsequent chapter is gimmicky, it works as it accentuates the dilemma of society dealing with violent youths committing crimes. Jack is a fascinating character as he knows he will be insecure for the rest of his life looking back at who will point the finger at Boy A. Readers will see how he got to the situation he is in as Jonathan Trigell takes the audience back through the lead character's life that led to his joining Boy B to commit a homicide. Jack knows first hand that society pretends to rehab convicts, but expects revenge any moment. Fans will appreciate this strong character study of a young man who has no future, lives to barely survive the present, and cannot forget the past as no one (including himself) will ever let that occur. Harriet Klausner

I couldn't put this book down. Loosely based on the real life James Bulger murder (which was, dare I say it, even more horrific than the crime Boy A has committed) it is both harrowing and thought provoking, and I found myself feeling optimistic for Jack at the end.

Sometimes the new worlds revealed in small-press crime stories are those other writers hesitate to enter. BOY A (Serpent's Tail, paper, $14), a shocker of a first novel by Jonathan Trigell, is the unnerving account of a young man (''Jack's his name. He chose it himself'') who has been released from prison after years of confinement for a crime so hideous the tabloids named him the ''Evilest Boy in Britain.'' Although it's told with extraordinary restraint, the story of Jack's life unfolds with a gathering horror that invites as much compassion as revulsion and leaves the reader (this one, anyway) in need of air.

Based on a true murder case, Boy A is a singularly powerful novel about a young man, who committed a terrible crime in childhood and has spent most of his brief life in juvenile prison institutions. Now he has to struggle to adapt to the world as an adult, haunted by flashes of violence and fear, trusted by few, understood by virtually none. A disturbing yet gripping story that explores both moral and practical questions, as well as the horrific negative repercussions of media hysteria.

Jonathan Trigell's haunting debut (loosely based on a real 1990s case) follows a nine-year-old who commits a gruesome murder and gets dubbed by politicians and news-papers ''The Evilest Boy in Britain.'' Fifteen years later, Boy A - a.k.a. Jack Burridge, an alias chosen to hide his identity from the still-outraged public - wins release from prison and re-immerses himself in a world that's unforgiving but strangely tantalizing in Boy A. He discovers the opposite sex (''a new species: of legs, of lips, of breasts, of hips, of eyes, of thighs''), while still tormented by violent urges and the fear that his past will be discovered. Trigell masterfully builds sympathy for Jack, the story's ending leaves a bittersweet ache for more.