Anita Shreve is back with an emotional 'Rescue'

RESCUE, by Anita Shreve. Little, Brown. 288 pp. $26.99.

No one can create the beginning of a complex relationship like Anita Shreve. Her latest book, "Rescue," opens with a car accident that changes both lives involved. Peter Webster, a rookie emergency medical technician, is roused at 1:10 a.m. to race to the scene of a one-car wreck involving a drunken driver who has "wrapped herself around a tree." The injured driver is a young woman named Sheila Arsenault. After she is rushed off in an ambulance, Webster, overcome by an unexpected desire, talks his way into the hospital to see her and then returns to the crash site, finds her keys and takes them to her. He feels a puzzling link to this patient he knows nothing about.

Sheila is defiant and prickly. She resents Webster's lecturing her on drunken driving. Just the same, his interest remains strong: "She was sexy and beautiful, and Webster wondered if he could smooth out the rough edges. Though maybe it was the rough edges that he liked." Confused by her anger but intrigued by her strength, he tracks her down after she leaves the hospital. Her greeting to the medic who probably saved her life is hardly inviting: "How do I know you're who you say you are," she snaps. "And, more important, why . . . should you care how I am?"

Shreve gets deep inside these characters, and her insights draw us into their lives. This random encounter in the small hours of the morning leads into a story of hope and fear, of promises made and broken. Sheila, almost an antiheroine, drinks to excess, remains in an abusive relationship and resists the young EMT who's so concerned about her. Webster, a beloved son of a strong family, nurses a mission to save lives and avert tragedies. He seems her opposite in every way. The relationship between the secretive, hard-drinking, oddly vulnerable Sheila and the down-to-earth small-town hero is wonderfully etched.

Shreve sometimes gets pigeonholed as a good women's novelist. But that misses her greatest strengths. Readers don't see the puppet mistress pulling the strings, labeling her characters as heroes or heroines. She gives them lives and then lets them stumble along - as do we all. Sheila and Webster fight and reconcile and fight again. Most important, we care about what happens to them.