[In The Girl in a Swing] Adams banks everything on the clue, that telltale narrative device that came in with the detective story and was perfected by Freud. Adams's job is to keep going a plausible tale about Alan Desland, a young, talented Berkshire ceramics dealer who falls in love with a beautiful German stenographer in Copenhagen, while dropping enough clues so that he can drive his story to the ordained awful moment toward which the clues have been pointing all along….

What Adams does pleasantly and well is weave his story in and out of places and things that seem to provide clues pointing to impending horrors, but don't….

Adams is not, I think, much interested in hinting to us that the strangest things in life are the common things that appear in everyday lives. He seems from the outset interested in strangeness itself and in making...