Final notice: Heather Lewis's Notice--actually her second novel--is published two years after her suicide.

Notice * By Heather Lewis * Serpent's Tail * $15

Heather Lewis writes for people who drink their coffee black and scalding. Her posthumously released new novel, Notice, achieves a starkness rarely seen outside the of crime novels. It's not the seamy subject matter that is striking in Notice but the bleakness of Lewis's vision, rendered in the ominously flat first-person voice of the young addict and prostitute at the novel's center, who is taken up by a sadistic businessman and his numbed wife, Ingrid.

There's no moral ambiguity in this situation. Ingrid and the narrator whose work name is Nina, bond over their agreement that Ingrid should leave the sadist. Yet they remain complicit in their mistreatment. The lines are so unclear for them that they don't recognize danger when they see it, and when they find themselves in pain, they simply ddissociate--no anger, no resistance, not even an "ouch." Sometimes they enjoy themselves. Nina keeps returning to the riskiest kinds of sex work, like a broken glass that somehow holds its shape. It's her job, she reflects, "to make people see something ugly inside. Take them to a place in themselves they didn't want to go but had to. Let them do this through me and then let them discard me, discount me."

Lewis's dispassionate descriptions of violence and rape are hard to read. Her narrator understands the dynamics of rough sex better than anything else. Nina moves through the world like the abused child that she was--with an appalling alertness to other people's shifting moods. These precise, moment-to-moment observations of feelings--including the narrator's own--give Notice much of its dark shimmer. This is the most original prose since Kathy Acker and in a similar vein.

Novelist Allan Gurganus was Lewis's mentor. In a postscript he describes their relationship--he knew two sentences into her first novel, House Rules, that she was a dazzling writer--ending with Lewis's return to drug use and her suicide in 2002 at 40. Gurganus explains that Notice was the second novel she wrote, which means that her noir thriller, The Second Suspect (1998)--also about a sadistic businessman, his wife Ingrid, and a young prostitute--is a reworking of this material, with the added comforts of law enforcement and a tidy ending. Now readers can choose between The Second Suspect and this grim early version, depending on whether they take their coffee with cream.

Marler writes for The New York Observer and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.