Early on in Michelle ­Huneven's "Blame," we learn that the novel's protagonist, Patsy MacLemoore, committed a terrible deed when in the grip of an out-of-control ­alcohol addiction: She ran over and killed a mother and daughter while driving drunk. Patsy, a young history professor, is sentenced to four years for the crime, but serves half that, It is this post-conviction period of her life that is the book's focus.

We move in and out of a California prison with her and then on to Los Angeles, where the chastened, guilt-wracked woman shapes a new life, much of it centered on her daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She is an intelligent and honest—and shattered— heroine who is re-creating her identity, fighting old urges, culling long-standing friends and making new ones. She is jaundiced by guilt and trauma, but also innocent and a bit ­naïve—she has been reborn, after all, through guilt and ­abstinence. She develops a friendship with Gilles, a gay recovering alcoholic, who brings her into contact with another AA denizen: Gilles's uncle, the handsome, silver-haired Cal. In his mid-60s, Cal is a father figure—Patsy's own father has also had alcoholic problems—and soon becomes a romantic, respectable safe haven; they marry.


Michelle Huneven

FSG, 291 pages, $25

The couple lives in a sprawling house, big enough to accommodate not only Cal's children from a previous marriage but also the homeless AA members that he takes in. As the distance from her prison stay grows, Patsy begins to ­develop a taste for independence that wars with her sense of obligation to Cal, to his children and the people he's trying to help. She denies herself the freedom that beckons, though, as a sort of punishment for her long-ago crime.

She and Cal grow apart, and Patsy finds herself shocked when she realizes the depth of his indifference. "Hopelessness washed through her," Ms. Huneven writes, "flooding her with an icy heat, hollowing her out, making the beautiful world—the backlit little oak leaves, the rain-scrubbed granite boulders, the water glinting through leaves—look as false as a small painted backdrop ­fluttering over the void."

In effect, Patsy has defined herself primarily as the killer of a mother and child, and shaped her life accordingly, with little reward, over the course of two decades. But then a chance discovery throws into question her assumptions about the past and especially about what happened when she was blacked out with drink on the horrible day that changed her life.

Michelle Huneven tells this story with a riveting sense of drama, and she deftly steers away from soap-operatic temptations. The dialogue in "Blame" isn't set off by quotation marks; conversations flow from person to person without obvious attribution, often blurring with the narration. That can make the novel tricky to follow, and some readers might feel a twinge of recognition in this passage describing her grad-school drinking days: "Closing bars. Straggling up Telegraph, University, in the fog-soaked dawn. Even then some said, We can't keep up with you, Patsy. The story of her life: nobody could keep up." But following the accident, as we watch her ­confront the bleakness that has enveloped her life, the ­effort of keeping up with Patsy is handsomely rewarded.

—Ms. Stern is Dow Jones ­Newswires' senior editor for global news coverage. She is based in New York.