In the humid dog days of a Pittsburgh summer weekend, Richard Christie, Head of Homicide, faces not one, but two mysterious murders. The victims---a polite woman and an angelic child---do not seem to be connected in any obvious way. Christie is short-handed, the clues don’t stack up, and he’s got a rookie detective, Colleen Greer, to look out for. These are his problems.
Colleen has problems, too. Her boyfriend is trying to break up with her, she’s got a serious crush on her mentor, Christie, and it turns out she knew both victims slightly. Early in the investigation, she gets an alarming idea about the perpetrator’s identity, but the man she suspects has no obvious connection to the victims. She has to move carefully with nothing but a gut feeling to go on---all the while disturbed by a series of memories of her own childhood.
Kathleen George’s novels have been praised for their subtle rendering of character and relationships---whether those relationships are among detectives or in the families of criminals. Boldly and elegantly written, Afterimage is a startling thriller.
Kathleen George is a theater professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also earned a Ph.D. in theater and a subsequent M.F.A. in fiction. She is the author of two previous mysteries featuring Richard Christie. She and her husband live in Pittsburgh on the city’s historic North Side.
Product Details
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (December 10, 2007)
Kathleen George is the best selling author of a series of thrillers set in Pittsburgh where she lives and where she is a professor of theatre at the University of Pittsburgh. Her fifth novel HIDEOUT (August 16, 2001) has won high praise already. Her fourth, THE ODDS, just now out in paperback, was a finalist for an Edgar® award for best novel of the year in 2010. She is also the author of the acclaimed novels TAKEN, FALLEN, and AFTERIMAGE, the short story collection THE MAN IN THE BUICK, and the 2011 edited collection of stories, PITTSBURGH NOIR. Early on George Pelecanos wrote "I look forward to reading anything Kathleen George writes." An Entertainment Weekly reviewer wrote of THE ODDS, "If anyone is writing better police thrillers than George, I don't know who it is."
She is married to writer Hilary Masters, who asked her out twenty years ago because he figured she, a theatre director, would be interesting--he was tired of being around writers. On the first date, she told him she had begun writing (or more accurately had taken it up again, having said from the time she was seven that she wanted to be a writer).
He thought, "Oh, no, not another one." But they had already hit it off and so it was too late. Now there are two of them in one household, shuffling around in sloppy clothes, coffee cups in hand, heading to paper, computer, typewriter.
"When I was eight, I took my accumulated miseries up to the attic," she wrote in "The Making of a Writer" "where I had discovered I could make an area, (a small stage set?) with table, chair, notebooks and pen, and suddenly my world seemed whole and good--a secret and a treasure."
*******Detailed media bio and photos:
Kathleen George was born in Johnstown Pennsylvania. As a child, she wanted to be a writer. She wrote stories and plays in high school and in her undergraduate years as a creative writing major at the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Theatre (also at Pitt). By then she had made her home in Pittsburgh. For eight years she taught theatre at Carlow College, where she directed many plays. Then she accepted a teaching position at Pitt where she continued to direct and teach dramatic literature and playwriting; in the early 80s, she began to add fiction writing back into the mix. In 1988, she earned an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing (also at Pitt!) on the side. She is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department.
Book-length fiction publications are: THE MAN IN THE BUICK, a collection of stories, BKMK press, 1999; TAKEN, a novel, Delacorte 2001; FALLEN, Dell 2004; AFTERIMAGE, St. Martin's Minotaur 2007; and THE ODDS, St. Martin's Minotaur 2009. TAKEN has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian. In August of 2011, HIDEOUT, a fifth novel, will launch. She is also the editor of the 2011 PITTSBURGH NOIR.
George has been granted fellowships at artists' colonies, including the VCCA and MacDowell. Her short fiction has appeared in journals and magazines which include Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review, North American Review, New Letters, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and one story was listed among the Distinguished in Best American Short Stories.
Her theatre publications are: Rhythm in Drama, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980, Playwriting: The First Workshop, Allworth Press, 2008 (first in print with Butterworth (Focal Press) 1994), and Winter's Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage, University of Delaware, 2005.
She has taught for Pitt in London and has served as faculty and as Academic Dean for Semester at Sea. She has directed for Pitt's mainstage and for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival productions which include The Rehearsal, The Country Wife, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Flea in Her Ear, and Our Town. A number of these productions were listed among the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ten Best of the Year. She has also produced and sometimes directed over sixty original plays written by her students.
I hate when I start reading a new book and realize it is part of a series, and not the beginning. But in this case, though I may have missed some of the interpersonal undercurrents between the characters, I thought the book read quite well on its own without having read the earlier books.
This is a different kind of police mystery than I have read before. It is much more about the police legwork in solving a pair of crimes that appear to be linked. Instead of the characters racing for their lives or involved in tense dramatic situations, they do more of what I assume police detectives do in real life: they look at evidence and talk to people and plan their investigations even when one of them has a gut feeling about who the guilty party may be.
Though not the same kind of page turner as a pure thriller-type novel, this book kept my interest on a more intellectual basis. In addition, there was a lot of emotional content as well. There was some jockeying for position among the various offers, the undercurrent of the rookie officer's crush on her married boss along with her need to impress him and be complimented and the rookie's interactions with a suspect who was her former boss.
I enjoyed the book enough that I plan to go back and read the earlier ones in the series.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
In Pittsburgh homicide squad Commander Richard Christie has some doubts with the new guy make that gal assigned to his unit. He likes rookie detective Colleen Greer's enthusiasm, but also fears her excess zeal could prove dangerous to her and the team. Still he has no choice but to toss her into the ocean while a hurricane hits.
Richard has two homicides to investigate. The first victim is Laura McCall, who Greer knows from working for her separated husband David Hoffman at a counseling clinic. The second is a child who Greer knows once again from her time at the clinic. Like her married boss, who she is attracted to; Greer wonders if Hoffman killed his wife and the child, but has some doubts as a niggling suspicion in her gut points to someone else she knew in her clinic days.
The third Christie Pittsburgh police procedural (see TAKEN and FALLEN) is a strong tale due to the simmering relationship between the commander and the rookie. Although this is Greer's first tale, her key appearance adds tension to the veteran homicide detective and will remind series fans more so of TAKEN in which Richard's wife Marina Benedict requested a separation. The mystery is well done especially as David asks his former employee for favors, which make him appear even guiltier to her, but it is the newbie who steals the show on a personal front with her hero worship attraction and her on the job investigative training.
Harriet Klausner
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
