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GOOD AND THE DEAD, THE by Seymour Shubin Write way Books, November 2000 246 pages $23.95 ISBN: 1885173822 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Seymour Shubin, author of this engaging novel, was once an Edgar finalist. It's understandable when you read this, his eleventh novel. Here is a story that will tap the nostalgia factor in every reader. Here is a story that crawls inside our hearts, that has us nodding in vivid recall as we walk with writer Ben Newman back down the streets of time, into his childhood.

Here is a story that from the first chapter catches at our fading memories. And something more. Because the mind works in strange ways, many times suppressing or erasing the bad times, the things we did as a child of which we are ashamed, or a little embarrassed about. If we pick at those memories, sometimes what we discover, is that the reality of those events of years ago are not exactly what we remember.

And sometimes, sometimes, participants in those old memories come back to haunt us. From the very beginning, Shubin's prose takes us first by the hand, and then by the throat. Ben Newman returns to his old neighborhood when his brother's wife dies in a tragic accident. As the spiral tightens and mistakes and missteps by Ben's brother bring police focus to the possibility that the woman was murdered, Ben begins a voyage of discovery. It's a voyage with increasing tension and suspense because Ben begins to discover that perhaps the woman was murdered, not by her husband, Ben's brother, but by someone from Ben's elementary school past. And it appears a killer is stalking Ben's former classmates in an effort to repay an old debt.

The book is properly called psychological suspense, and it is a thriller. Anyone who reads this engaging novel will come away with a different understanding and perhaps an altered perspective on their golden youthful days in elementary school.

The reviewer is the author of

INNER PASSAGES and

A SUPERIOR MYSTERY

http://www.Minnesotacrimewave.org/

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, January 2003

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