NONFICTION - May 5, 1991

UNANSWERED CRIES by Thomas French (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 360 pp.) . Kitty Genovese was supposed to be the textbook case, the unforgettable example: Brutally attacked, she cried out for help over and over again. None of her New York neighbors came to her aid, and she was found dead. Clearly--tragically--some of Karen Gregory’s Florida neighbors did not learn the moral lesson. They heard one piercing scream on a late spring evening, and then, one by one, they came up with rationales for ignoring it. Except for one man, who said he hadn’t heard it. Newspaper journalist Thomas French tells the story of an unlikely suspect, and an even unlikelier link between him and the detective who pursues him. He also evokes the sinister reality of the new suburbs, where people no longer chat over backyard fences or invite the folks from down the block in for supper; where a pervasive impermanence encourages irresponsibility. Sometimes he gives in to overblown prose, but for the most part this is a taut, desperate story of petty cowardice and wildly mistaken impressions.