When skilled novelists shift from their primary genre to another, the results are often intriguing. Joyce Carol Oates has been doing it for years, writing crime novels under a pseudonym, and P.D. James briefly interrupted her stellar career with “Children of Men”, a downbeat science fiction take on the future. Now, the gifted Oregon writer Diana Abu-Jaber takes the plunge with her latest novel, “Origin.”
      Fashioned as a crime novel – a police procedural would be more accurate -- and set in a snowy Syracuse, “Origin” begins with an encounter between a mother whose baby has been found dead in her crib and thirtysomething Lena Dawson, a fingerprint technician associated with the police department. To the authorities, the baby’s demise looks to be a tragic, yet sadly routine case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, but the mother’s not buying it. Lena, whose job description does not include interacting with the public, understands all too well why she’s being sought. “You’re the evidence specialist?” the woman says to Lena. “You can find things. That’s what I heard. You’re better than the police.”
      Lena isn’t so much better than the police as she is different than the police. A woman who lives deeply in her own mind, Lena is an astute observer of evidence and she gained notoriety earlier in her career when cracked an unsolvable murder. She does feel a particular affinity for cases involving children and is “steered to investigations concerning lost or hurt or damaged children. In the investigative world, a woman without children is supposedly the least encumbered by emotional baggage” – something which in Lena’s case, is seriously untrue.
      Raised by a loving but emotionally detached foster family, Lena spends much of her internal life harboring the belief that she was, as a very young child, snatched from the arms of a different mother – a great ape – and somehow she had “landed” in a rain forest, lived among the creatures of the jungle until her discovery by…someone, she’s not sure just who. Her sensibility about her past was inadvertently encouraged by her foster mother who refused, as she grew up, to give her any credible information about how she came into the family. It’s a preposterous premise, yet Abu-Jaber sells it with ease.
      More babies are found dead and the police are stymied – just a horrible coincidence, is there a baby serial killer on the loose, is it a terrorist plot, as one mother tells the media? Lena figures out that the deaths all have a common thread: each child died from exposure to a toxic baby blanket the parents had all received anonymously. But as a procedural, “Origin” remains (perhaps intentionally) tepid, because gradually Lena comes to the realization that her elusive past is tied into the case and she is probably to be a victim herself. So the story ultimately – and wisely – revolves around Lena’s present life and her obsession with her roots. As in “Crescent,” which featured a 30ish woman protagonist who felt unsettled in her day to day existence, Lena is necessarily guarded in her personal relationships, although she’s been married – now separated – from an overbearing cop, Charlie, from the force. Both characters, too, are ripe to find redemption and peace by falling in love with the right person (and both do!).
      As Abu-Jaber effortlessly unfolds the story, it’s soon clear that “Origin” is no more a story about crime than her previous novel, the superb “Crescent,” was about food. The underlying theme here, also observed in “Crescent,” is Abu-Jaber’s abiding interest in the exploration of the myriad aspects of identity – who are we and how can we feel ”at home” if not physically, at least in our mind?
      Although latter third of the book lags at times, and the truth about the crime is explained in a cumbersome exposition, in the end, none of this matters: when she’s honed in on her real motif, Abu-Jaber writes prose and dialogue with the best of them, and is capable of the most delicate and poignant insight into the complexity of relationships, clear in the knowledge that we flawed human beings can’t love – or be loved -- unless we know who we are.