Scratched
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
When Algy Temple, pool player, sleuth and Ivy League university lawyer, investigates the highly suspicious death of a retired university don, his contemporaneous involvement in a high stakes pool tournament in Providence becomes a tiresome, contentious obligation that must be endured. As he delves into the life of the deceased, he unexpectedly finds himself on a path that leads him to Rome, the vendetta-ridden Boot of Italy and into a haunted past of corruption and conspiracy with a linkage to the tournament, gambling, shylocks, and mobsters unexpected even in Providence where old world shadows hang heavy in the air.
Add an abduction, a Ponzi, an outraged Italo-American community locked in a culture war with the University, a hustler’s last gambit for recognition, and a fiancé focused on their wedding in two weeks, his investigation becomes a match of wits with a dead man, and a pool wager of life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Partridge's excellent third Algy Temple mystery (after 2008's Straight Pool), the Providence, R.I., attorney, who's in-house counsel for Carter University on College Hill, has too much on his plate. Academics opposed to Christopher Columbus are agitating to change the name of the holiday honoring him, a sure-fire recipe for conflict in the heavily Italian-American city. Providence's reform-minded mayor has just named Temple to a commission overseeing a pool tournament. A Madoff-like scam artist's Ponzi scheme has jeopardized the investment account of the trust that helps fund the university's Institute for Italian Studies whose director emeritus, Italo Palagi, has just been found dead of an accidental overdose of oxycodone. Temple, who suspects Palagi's death and the institute's financial troubles are related, sets out to unravel the truth. Partridge adroitly weaves together the different plot points of this witty and well-written whodunit.
