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Trespass

Valerie Martin Nan A. Talese, $25

Valerie Martin is a marvel. She takes us to such unexpected places, so elegantly, so deeply yet delicately, and with such unexpected insights.

She wrote Mary Reilly, the story of a housemaid in the Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde) home, and The Great Divorce, which examines splits of all kinds, including that of humans and nature.

She wrote Property, which won the 2003 Orange Prize. Its female narrator is given a wedding-present slave who bears a child by the narrator's husband. Everyone is harmed by owning, or being, property.

Trespass, as the title indicates, is about boundaries and those who cross them.

Chloe Dale is an artist preparing to illustrate Wuthering Heights and intrigued by the compelling and troublesome Heathcliff, whom she has decided must be a gypsy. Her husband Brendan is a historian on sabbatical, writing a book on Emperor Frederick II, a 13th century Norman potentate who reluctantly participated in a Crusade.

As the couple ponder these intruders, their son Toby introduces another more immediate one: Salome Drago, a Croatian refugee and college classmate he loves. The women are instantly at odds. Salome is different from what Chloe expected, what she is used to, what she would want.

Salome is described as ''like a jaguar among nervous chickens'' and ''as if she was raised by hyenas.''

When Toby's attachment intensifies, his mother attacks: '' 'I thought you were smarter than this.' Yes, that too, and some warning about the future. About foreigners, people from an entirely different culture. About Catholics. 'Is she even a citizen? Is she trapping you like this just to stay in the country?' ''

Salome's family - a father and brother (her grandmother, mother and a younger brother are lost to the war between Serbia and Croatia) - lives in Louisiana, where father Branko Drago is tagged the ''Oyster King.''

Chloe tags Salome ''creepy'' and focuses some of her unhappiness on another ''foreigner,'' a man who hunts uninvited on the family land and may simply not understand the concept "posted." Zigor is a Basque who works as a plumber and speaks little English.

There are terrible mysteries attached to Salome's childhood, to the horrors of Serbian atrocities in Croatia. This narrative calmly and retroactively reveals a few of these mysteries, bit by bit.

Martin is so thoughtful, so intriguing, in how she interweaves and explores the beginning of America's war, the war between Serbia and Croatia, the domestic fires, petty moments and true evil.

The various trespasses, as in sins, and trespassing, as in unlawful entry or interference with people, property and rights converge. Some wrongs will never be righted. Some adaptations are made.

But Martin resists tying up all loose ends - another of her laudable qualities.