After Oz

McAlpine’s sluggish latest (after Holmes Entangled) reimagines The Wizard of Oz as a psychological thriller. Eleven-year-old Dorothy Gale and her dog, Toto, go missing during a terrible tornado in 1896. Both are found unharmed four days later in a pumpkin patch two miles from their home in Sunbonnet, Kans. Relief turns to wariness when Dorothy describes befriending a talking lion, scarecrow, tin man, and wizard during the storm; her neighbors attribute Dorothy’s tales to the influence of evil and a lack of religious training from her unpopular uncle Henry and aunt Emily. When Dorothy also claims she accidentally killed a witch, under circumstances eerily similar to the death of an old woman in town, she’s accused of murder and sentenced to seven years in the Topeka Insane Asylum. Her case piques the interest of 28-year-old alienist Evelyn Grace Wilford, who tries to determine if Dorothy could really be a killer and sends her findings to her cousin, writer Frank Baum. The pace is lethally slow, only picking up speed in the last 50 or so pages, and by then, even an intriguing 11th-hour twist isn’t quite enough to save the day. This misses the mark. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Aug.)