IN 1995 PAT BARKER won the Booker Prize for Ghost Road, the last in a trilogy about the psychological damage of war. It was set to the backdrop of the so-called 'Great War', the one in which the concept of shell-shock was first made explicit.
That book was like a time machine controlled by a skilled but dangerous driver: it slam-braked its readers back eight decades into a world full of unwashed clothes and brute force and bewilderment about what it is that makes a man a man and a woman a mystery.
Border Crossing does not offer us the comfort of being set in the past. Instead it keeps us pinned to the wall of the present, an ugly place where little boys are murderers and psychotherapy is both sophisticated and still in its infancy.
Barker is good at her male protagonists, and once again the world she depicts is peopled most strongly with male characters. The women drift in to, but more often out of, the men's lives.
Tom Seymour is a child psychologist who has for many years been involved in the process of determining whether juvenile criminals should be judged as children or adults. While his marriage falls apart - ironically because he and his wife find they cannot conceive a child - Tom separates himself from his own emotions by writing a book, the fiction based on his own clinical experiences.
Among his many cases was a 10-year-old who had smothered an old woman with a pillow, yet who swore he had not done it.