The Good and the Dead

The good and the dead -- what does it mean? Don't even try to guess. Ben Newman, a writer of true-detective stories, has written about scores of murders and thinks he has seen it "all" -- until he's confronted with the murders of adults from his old neighborhood whom he hasn't seen since childhood. It begins with the body of his brother's wife found floating in the family swimming pool. Suspicion immediately centers, with good reason, on Ben's brother, a physician. But then Ben -- who has always looked on murder as something that happened to "other people," finds himself confronted with a series of strange deaths: among them a pharmacist he'd known since kindergarten, and a woman whom he'd kissed in the moonlight on a long-ago school trip. In this, his eleventh novel, Edgar-finalist Seymour Shubin akes us on a bizarre journey through several murders that eventually come to reflect on our own humanity. This is a novel, a rarity in psych/suspense mystery fiction, that combines truly unforgettable characters with pure action.