ONthe surface, the Stones looks like the perfect American family. Stay-athome father Daniel is a respected illustrator with Marvel Comics. Wife Laura is a college professor who teaches her students about Dante's nine circles of hell. (Laura is so perfect that when she and Daniel first met, her teeth had no cavities. ) However it's their daughter, 14-yearold Trixie, whose life seems the most charmed: doting parents, good grades, trophy boyfriend Jason and every expectation of a rosy future.

If there are hairline fissures in that perfect scenario, well, nobody's examining them too closely.

Then Trixie is date-raped at a party, and everything changes. When she tells her father it was Jason who assaulted her, having dumped her earlier, Daniel wants to kill him.

In the course of a few days, their lives unravel. It seems Daniel had a whole other life he has never spoken about and has been keeping his anger at bay by channelling it into his graphics.

Laura has been having an affair with one of her students. Trixie has been leading a double life too.

Then it transpires that Trixie has told a number of lies about the rape, blurring what people like to see as a black-and-white issue. But in the cold glare of an emergency room, Picoult makes us think, how does a 14-year-old girl tell her father she's been sexually active, that she had planned to seduce her ex-boyfriend the night she was raped and that she was drunk beyond reason?

Desperate to believe his daughter's story, Daniel asks her why she lied to the police about being a virgin. Sobbing, she tells him: ?I couldn't tell them. You were standing right there."

How far will he go in order to protect his daughter? For Daniel, whose daughter seems to have morphed from cute kid to out-of-control teenager overnight, the answer is to hell and back. Daniel finds himself in a nightmare realm, Picoult's invented tenth circle of hell.

It's not easy to imagine a book with date rape, self-mutilation, suicide and murder being a page-turner, but that's exactly what Picoult has achieved.

It's not an easy read. The author has placed tripwires everywhere, forcing the reader to consider countless uncomfortable issues, most difficult of all whether Trixie was actually raped or not. To say the book is over-plotted is to put it mildly; right from the start the reader is beaten over the head with deep moral messages and smothered with symbolism. The Dante bits are brilliant but annoying. Picoult has paralleled the main story with the storyline of Daniel's latest comic-inprogress (drawn in real life by Dustin Weaver) . . . again clever, but intrusive.

There's resolution of sorts in the end, as much as you can ever hope for in real life. The book is sympathetic, contemporary and important. It asks relevant questions about subjects such as date rape, parental vigilance and the sexuality of the young. And, as in life, there are no easy answers.