The Man Who Murdered Himself
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Cured to death.
The posh, idyllic Care Clinic promises to cure such twentieth-century afflictions as eating disorders, substance abuse, and low self-esteem. But when Shelly Lowenkopf and Homer Greeley—two former detectives from the Bronx—begin to investigate the whereabouts of one of the clinic's most loyal patients, they're in for some shocking treatment.
A maniacal director browbeats patients and staff alike. A beautiful blonde picnics with a chimp and listens to Disney songs on a crank phonograph. And a bunch calling itself the Church of the Unflagging Eye worships the television set and everything on it. For Lowenkopf and Greeley, it would be just another missing persons case—if people weren't suddenly turning up dead. Now the two detectives must solve a horrible killing before murder becomes the clinic's nastiest—and most stubborn—habit.
The Man Who Murdered Himself is the 7th book in the Allerton Avenue Precinct Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fliegel's ( Time to Kill ) comic mystery takes PIs Shelly Lowenkopf and Homer Greely to a pricey but strange New Jersey clinic. Roberta Davenport hires the two to find her husband, Howard, who has exhausted their savings on self-improvement programs at the clinic and seems determined to stay indefinitely. Shelly checks in as a patient just in time to see Ray Singh, a staff statistician, mowed down by a driverless truck. When Shelly realizes his treatment--ostensibly to stop smoking--involves having several hundred volts of electricity run through him, he opts to continue his stay as an initiate of the Church of the Unflagging Eye: TV worshipers who run their training course at the clinic. Soon after, psychologist Henry Harrison, the admired but dictatorial director of the clinic, is dismembered with an ax--and Howard Davenport is the primary suspect. Fliegel's humor about TV worship is overplayed and ultimately unfocused, and readers with imagination will realize whodunit the moment Harrison is discovered. But Shelly and Homer's sane presence keep the book on course while allowing for freshly odd moments.
