Publisher Description
Fred Carver investigates a series of suspicious deaths in a stately Florida retirement community
Hattie Evans, a retired schoolteacher, isn't one to fuss. When her husband drops dead of a heart attack, she does her best to move on without too many tears. After all, Jerome was seventy years old. But an anonymous note, asserting that her husband was murdered, shakes her resolve, and she seeks out help. The police are useless, save that they send her to Fred Carver—a former Orlando cop who turned PI when a bullet shattered his left knee.
Her case takes Carver into the depths of Solartown: an old-age mecca where seventy is the new forty, golf carts are the only way to get around, and death from natural causes is nowhere to be found.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Lutz including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.
Spark is the 7th book in the Fred Carver Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Noir is a fitting descriptive for Edgar-winning Lutz's latest Fred Carver mystery (after Hot ), even though the middle-aged PI with a bum knee plies his trade on the sun-drenched west coast of Florida. After retiree Jerome Evans dies unexpectedly, apparently from a heart attack, his flinty widow, Hattie, receives a note suggesting that her husband was murdered, and hires Carver to investigate. While poking around the total-care retirement village of Solartown, Carver learns that Hattie's next-door neighbor is smitten with her, that the deceased had been fooling around with the widow Crane and that Jerome's coronary was verified by the village's medical center. After finding Maude Crane's body, apparently a suicide, the PI is warned off the case with a vicious beating from a steroid-using, alcoholic sadist named Adam Beed. Wary but undeterred, Carver uncovers connections that link Beed, the medical center and a drug company, grasping the details of their chilling experiment only when he and Hattie are in Beed's nasty clutches. Although the ending is a bit abrupt, the story is highly satisfying, powered mainly by the bleak, consistent outlook of its hero, who observes that if he changed his occupation, ``he'd miss the job but not the people.''
