The narrator of A.M. Homes' fourth book is an educated, unctuous, pathetic sex offender, deep in middle age, who was imprisoned 23 years earlier for the brutal murder of a little girl -- the "ended" Alice of the title. His latest parasitic correspondent is a sulky college girl with an unseemly fascination for a 12-year-old boy living down the street. She begins what amounts to an epistolary peep show, sending the prisoner chirpy letters outlining her summer of love ("Took Matt to Tower. Bought a falafel. Tennis date tomorrow. Can't wait! Did it in the blueberry patch."). Though he grumbles about her exclamation marks and imbecilic language, the letters supply the prisoner with just enough detail to allow him to cast his own vibrant fantasies.

It is those fantasies coupled with quotidian prison life, all of it throbbing with violence and melodrama, that are the unsavory meat of the book: imagining boiling his hands to heighten his sensitivity when molesting young girls; a breathless scab-eating session; the youngsters giving each other golden showers after a frolic in the sprinkler; the de rigueur remembered childhood sexual abuse and equally necessary prison rape scene; shooting the coed up the vagina with a BB gun. The list goes on, ad nauseam.

Fueled by his weeks of imaginings, the prisoner moves toward his appearance before the prison board and his impending release. Like Freddie limping back to Elm Street, he has plans to visit the college girl who happens to live -- would you believe? -- in dead Alice's old neighborhood. But first, he offers a hollow rationale for his (and the author's) story: "I am no better or worse than you," he claims, dragging in that old universality-of-human-nature ploy. Too bad we can't put A. M. Homes in prison for writing a book this gratuitous. Or for her mistaken assumption that, by alliterating the prisoner's feverish reveries, she injects an element of poetry into the prisoner's plight. Lines like "piss-stained pages ... the crustation of evaporated excrete -- a conservator's conundrum, not the kind of compilation collectors would kvell over" should land anyone in jail.

-- Kate Moses