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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not As Good as Psychopath,
By A Customer
This review is from: Murder Suicide: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book was okay. It started out with an intriguing scene, in which it was unclear if Snow had been murdered or committed suicide, then continued through the investigation. Snow was well portrayed - a man who alienated friends and family through his demands for perfection, and whose demands on himself were so great they actually caused him to have seizures. However, the book never really gripped me the way Ablow's prior book, Psychopath, did. This book felt scattered, awfully slow at times, and I had a hard time making sense out of the key characters' actions or beliefs. Snow's decision to escape his life never quite rang true, somehow. This book did not have the original look inside the killer's mind which made Psychopath so exceptional. Also, the ending felt contrived. I did not get any sense of chemistry between Clevenger and Whitney this time, and the travel and scenery, which were excellent in Psychopath, were not well portrayed here. I look forward to Ablow's next book, and hope it is better than this one.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A perfect beach book that Ablow fans cannot miss,
By Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Murder Suicide: A Novel (Hardcover)
Keith Ablow's lifelong interest has been to determine what markers or kind of trauma brings a person to the breaking point. He has testified as an expert in some of America's most highly publicized trials." He writes both nonfiction (texts and medical tomes) and novels starring his alter ego, Frank Clevenger ("clever avenger" perhaps? But what's in a name?)
Clevenger is a forensic psychiatrist who is a consultant to the Boston police. In Ablow's latest, MURDER SUICIDE, Clevenger is asked to help unravel the events that led to the shooting death of Dr. John Snow, a brilliant fifty-year-old MIT scientist, found dead in an alley on his way to Massachusetts General Hospital. Snow was to undergo a very controversial neurosurgical procedure when he was found dead with a gun near the body. Murder? Suicide? John Snow, Ph.D. suffered from epilepsy. He was plagued by grand mal seizures from which he would collapse, lose consciousness, and breathe like a bellows. His limbs would jerk wildly, his teeth clamping shut and sometimes tearing through his tongue. When he was 10, his parents, fearing a brain tumor, had him thoroughly examined and his "EEG told the story: clusters of delta and theta electrical spikes shooting through his temporal lobes, sparking up toward his frontal lobes. Bolts of inspiration gone wild. The more intensely he focused on what he loved --- inventing --- the more he suffered." His professional career had been amazingly successful in spite of his handicap, but Snow had reached a point in his life when his most important and valuable secret military invention had to be completed --- an invention that could save the world or annihilate it. The decision to undergo brain surgery had been his "plan to free himself from his tangled neurons --- and, quite possibly, from all entanglements. On the one hand, the idea was intoxicating. Snow could have lived the unfettered life of a stranger in a distant land, with no obligations to anyone, no guilt over past sins, nothing defining or limiting him. On the other hand, the question had to be asked how much Snow's freedom would have cost the people who considered him part of their life stories, their realities?" These ponderables lead to one of the major themes Ablow explores in his novel: "Are any of us free to the extent that we are free to move on completely?" To his doctor, J. T. (Jet) Heller, his young and ambitious neurosurgeon, the only question at hand was how soon could he put his scalpel to work. He promised the inventor that he could cut out the parts of his brain that "clog up" when he concentrates intensely or is at a particularly high level of stress. But the inherent danger in this is possible blindness, deafness, death or worse, living in a vegetative state. But Snow is finished with his family, his mistress, his work, and his partner. He decides to have the surgery and gleefully tells everyone good-bye, whether they understand how final that farewell is or not. He was optimistic about the surgery and had no immediate plans to die --- by his own hand or anyone else's. When Frank Clevenger begins to untangle the remnants of Snow's life, he finds himself faced with some of his own demons. And the passages depicting the pathos of those struggles are the most moving and finely written in this typical "summer novel." Clevenger has an adopted eighteen-year-old son with a dark past --- a past not much different from Frank's own. As he travels the hallways of the hospital and the alleyways of Snow's life, he sees how much he has sheltered the boy. He exercises a protocol of painful stretching as he begins to understand how letting go a bit will serve to bring them closer. MURDER SUICIDE is a perfect beach book, and Ablow fans will surely not want to miss it. --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Implausibly concocted psychological thriller,
By
This review is from: Murder Suicide: A Novel (Hardcover)
Keith Ablow's "Murder Suicide" featuring forensic pathologist and psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger is a thankfully fast reading but mediocre murder mystery.
Dr. John Snow, a brilliant aerospace engineer and inventor on the verge of undergoing radical neurosurgery to correct debilitating lifelong seizures, is found shot outside the hospital an hour before the procedure. Boston detective Mike Coady calls in Clevenger when it is indeterminate as to whether this was a case of suicide or murder. Snow was on the threshhold of a breakthrough in revolutionary stealth missile technology which would provide a huge financial windfall for his company and partner Collin Corroway. The unhappily married Snow was being inspired in his thought processes by his mistress gorgeous but troubled and also married art dealer Grace Baxter. Apparently Snow's surgery to be performed by accomplished neurosurgeon Dr. Jet Heller, had the potential to cause selective amnesia as a byproduct. Snow would lose the memories of all those that had a part in his life, family and lover included. Fantastically Baxter herself was found days after Snow's demise, apparently having taken her own life by slashing her wrists and neck. Questions arose as to whether she also might have been murdered. Ablow conveniently bestowed upon all the peripheral characters in this book including Snow's wife, son and daughter, business partner, Baxter's husband George Reese and even Dr. Heller enough financial and emotional baggage to make them strong suspects in Snow's murder. Clevenger must wade through all the rhetoric to solve this improbable case. Ablow's conclusion is melodramatic and ridiculously farfetched.
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