Incentive for Death
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
They all sold their life insurance policies to the same company— and now they' re all dead. Mac and Oliver are on the case.
On a beautiful spring morning in Washington, D.C., a high-profile attorney is found dead in his office. McDermott " Mac" Burke and Oliver Shaw, homicide investigators for the Metropolitan Police Department, are called to investigate. There appear to be no signs of foul play, but there is also no obvious sign of a natural cause of death.
The detectives are perplexed until the medical examiner notices a tiny pin prick on the lawyer' s neck and theorizes that the man was injected with succinylcholine— aka " sux" — which is a common horse tranquilizer that dissipates quickly in the body.
As Mac and Oliver begin to look further, they discover that the lawyer had sold his life insurance policy to a large viatical company. Then, they realize that more deaths under mysterious circumstances have occurred among those who' ve sold their policies to the same company.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former lawyer Spoonhour's lackluster debut traces a series of mysterious deaths in connection with a shady company that purchases life insurance policies. D.C. Metropolitan Police detectives Mac Burke and Oliver Shaw are dispatched to the offices of Gideon & McCaffery, an influential Washington law firm, after its managing partner, Weldon Van Damm, is found dead at his desk. A medical examiner notices the small puncture wound on Van Damm's body and determines that someone injected him with a lethal substance, leading Burke and Shaw to launch a homicide inquiry. The plot thickens when another man drops dead at a local baseball game with a similar wound, and Burke and Shaw learn that both he and Van Damm had recently sold their life insurance policies to the same viatical firm. As they dig deeper, the pair links more deaths to the firm, and race to keep the body count from rising. Spoonhour fails to whip up much suspense from his premise, and the circumstances of several killings strain credulity. There's little to distinguish this rote legal thriller from similar fare.
