Dear Old Dead
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A retired FBI agent defends a do-gooder doctor suspected of murdering a media mogul: "Haddam plays the mystery game like a master" (Chicago Tribune).
Michael Pride could have been a world-class surgeon, but his good intentions got the best of him. He opened a clinic in one of New York's roughest neighborhoods, and stuck around when gangs, drugs, and guns turned it into a war zone. Supporting his mission is Charles van Straadt, a media titan with a knack for incendiary headlines and a soft spot for good works. When a sex scandal threatens to derail Pride's clinic, van Straadt is the only one who stands by him—until the mogul is poisoned, and the doctor appears to be the only person who could have done it.
Former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian has a chance of proving Pride's innocence. In a part of New York that feels more like Beirut than Broadway, it will take more than good works for the two of them to survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gregor Demarkian, Haddam's ( Bleeding Hearts ) Armenian-American detective, returns in his tenth holiday mystery, this rather tangentially connected to Father's Day. With a gang war raging around a Harlem medical clinic and casualties pouring in, anyone could have poisoned newspaper magnate Charles van Stradt, the clinic's benefactor. Chief among the suspects are clinic director Dr. Michael Pride and head nurse Sister Augie, either of whom might have killed to keep Michael's arrest on a morals charge out of van Stradt's paper . But Michael and Augie are well-accounted for when van Stradt's granddaughter and expected heir quaffs her own dose of strychnine, so suspicion shifts to the remaining grandchildren and a lone right-to-life protester. Haddam is sparing with her clues--the reader senses rather than solves the killer's identity--and her denouement is formulaic. And in a mostly bland cast, Pride's character is frankly inexplicable. A smart, dedicated physician, he is a homosexual who not only continues to practice unsafe sex but already has the symptoms of full-blown AIDS. To impute his irresponsibility to compulsion is unthinking, the more so when it serves no plot purpose. Dear Old Dead is a disappointment for those who have enjoyed Haddam in this guise or as Orania Papazoglou.
