BOOKS: Can Memory Be a Devilish Inventor?

Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan (Knopf; 205 pages; $22) seems likely to / be considered the most powerful and disturbing true crime narrative to appear since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. But what was the crime? Certainly it was not satanic abuse, says Wright, a New Yorker reporter, although a man sits in jail for confessing to just that.

A few years ago in Olympia, Washington, two sisters, 18 and 20, began to talk, separately, about gross sexual abuse each said she had experienced as a child and had only recently begun to remember. Charges were filed against the girls' father, Paul...