Suspects
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Little Big Man author Thomas Berger takes the murder mystery and runs with it in this trip around a quiet suburb with a dark secret.
“A cutting, ironic wit and a precision of detail so deadly it hurts when you laugh.” —Ms.
Mary Jane Jones doesn't like to meddle. She's content to stay out of the admittedly tame gossip of her suburban neighborhood, even in the fresh loneliness of widowhood. In fact, if it wasn't for the daily invites to dinner she receives from her sweet neighbor, Donna, she would be content to just stay home alone. Never one to risk being rude, Mary slowly finds herself not just a frequent guest in Donna's spotless house, but enjoying her company, and that of her three-year old daughter.
So when Donna doesn't pick up the phone during their usual dining hours, something's too amiss for Mary to stay put. Unable to depend on slow moving cops, Mary doesn't just come over, she breaks in.
What she finds is almost beyond comprehension. Donna and her little girl have been brutally slaughtered in their beds.
The innocent façade of the town shattered, two world-weary detectives must find the murderer before he strikes again. But as officers Nick Moody and Dennis LeBeau grill their two primary suspects, Larry Howland, the late Donna Howland’s husband, and Lloyd Howland, Larry’s half-brother, the harder it is for them to piece together the motive. Lloyd, who had been in love with Donna for as long as he can remember, forges a bond with one of the detectives, but can’t seem to keep away from oddball scenarios that put him at odds with the law. Between his misadventures and the mystery brewing in town, Suspects is a story that entertains on every single page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berger's 20th novel suffers from a surfeit of pages and a lack of story. There is probably enough material in this fairly straightforward murder mystery to satisfy the demands of a novella; but for a standard 256-page novel, the mystery, the characters and their histories are not nearly complex enough to sustain the narrative. To fill out the page count, far too many diluting diversions, descriptions and side stories have been introduced. The resulting concoction--described as a meditation on "friendship, family loyalty, and the American dream"--is little more than a collection of run-of-the-mill human interest stories pasted onto what could have been a fine, workmanlike whodunit set in a typical American town. In the first two-thirds of the narrative, Berger calls the motives and actions of a large portion of his dramatis personae into question; but, because of his narrative perambulations, there is very little suspense or sense of urgency. In a novel more about police than about suspects, Berger (Robert Crews, 1994, etc.) gets caught up in the inner lives of a rather large cast of cameo characters and in arguments about the good old days before notions of individual rights and accountability came along and made life difficult for cops. Too caught up, as it happens, to be able to divert his readers from the fact that his red herring is far too red to escape notice.
