If Two of Them Are Dead [Hardcover]

Carol Cail (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1996

During a visit to relatives, journalist Maxey Burnell learns that her supposedly dead father is still alive, and that he had been seen fleeing the scene of the murder of Maxey's mother ten years earlier.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

In her third appearance, amateur sleuth Maxey Burnell (Unsafe Keeping, 1995, etc.), editor of a Colorado weekly called Blatant Regard, proves that you can indeed go home again and even exorcise the ultimate Freudian nightmare: that your father might have killed your mother. This time out, Maxey, who's splitting with husband Reece, needs a change of scenery, and so she flies off to her old hometown in Nebraska to stay with Aunt Janet and cousin Curtis. The initial surprise is that uptight Janet is living with free spirit Scotty Springer. But surprises of a more unpleasant sort happen when Maxey noses around into the ten-year-old killing of her mother. Folks start getting very frosty when she asks about the unsolved case; then she discovers that her father Deon, whom she's thought long dead, is very much alive. And Janet saw him leaving the scene of that long-ago murder. Maxey visits him and is convinced, even when he seems wary and only guardedly affectionate, that he didn't do it. Her father seems eager, however, for her to leave the past undisturbed. But if he didn't do it, who did? An ex- lover of her mother's who wanted the affair kept secret? And what was the relationship between Mom and her childhood friend Sophie Otis? Something . . . irregular? Characters dominate, in a laid-back believable way, in a genre that's usually plot-driven. The result: a novel about small-town Americana that also satisfies as a whodunit. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

There were only three people at the scene of the crime when Maxey's mother was shot--and two of them are dead. When Maxey returns to her small Nebraska town, she receives the shocking news: the only suspect in her mother's murder is a man who was supposed to have died many years before: her father. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (May 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312143613
• ISBN-13: 978-0312143619
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,984,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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