Schooled on the deadly city streets

By Ann Prichard
Special for USA TODAY

Chaos Theory combines corruption and kids dodging killers in a Grisham-like thriller that shares elements with The Client and The Street Lawyer but outshines both.

Author Gary Krist takes things a step beyond those best sellers, with an engaging ensemble of more complex characters. Renee Daniels is a burned-out journalist turned high school teacher. Frank Laroux is an FBI agent, a former source and Renee's one-time lover. The interracial duo spars engagingly while teaming up again to help two teenagers whose ill-timed attempt to score some loose joints leads to a murder conspiracy involving the city's homeless.

The setting is Washington, D.C., in the mid-1990s. ''It was a city of eyes. There were thousands of them -- the eyes of security guards, video cameras mounted on the walls of government buildings, closed-circuit surveillance systems. HoJo, the eight-fingered Dominican from the soup kitchen, claimed that every statue in Washington, D.C. -- if you looked closely enough -- had pinhole cameras for pupils, each one wired direct to the office of the mayor. . . . On quiet nights the mayor would sit in front of a wall of video screens, drinking a vodka tonic and just watching.''

The homeless have every right to be paranoid, because someone is making them disappear. When two of Renee's best students stumble into the plot, their middle-class lives are abruptly changed. Krist is particularly good at describing the kids' feelings. Dennis is black, a top athlete and student who faces conflicting expectations from parents and peers. Jason is white, a slightly nerdy kid dealing with his mother's suicide and father's depression. Both rely heavily on Renee for support.

Chaos Theory's appeal lies largely in these characters, as well as Krist's agility with points of view. The coming-of-age aspects add humanity and humor to the genre's obligatory chase scenes.Chaos Theory

By Gary Krist

Random House, 347 pp., $24