Customer Reviews

Murder Suicide

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

This is the newest in the Dr. Frank Clevenger series. Frank is a forensic psychiatrist. He has helped the police with some headline making cases. In this case, he's asked to determine if a famous inventor has committed suicide or if he was murdered. The man was entering the hospital for experimental surgery that may cure him of the seizures that have plagued him his entire life. The surgery will also destroy his memory of everyone in his past, from his wife and children to his partner. He'll have his brilliant mind and will be free of all entanglements. He'll be starting his entire life over. If it succeeds.

Frank is the single father of Billy, a trouble teen that he adopted. Frank struggles to be a good father while he has no good example of fatherhood to refer to, his own father beat him regularly. He has cut out his drinking and drugging that used to help him through his own personal crisis', now he fights sober.

Good series -- I enjoy it now with Billy as an added emotional anchor for Frank. Frank's struggle to be a good father and his fight to stay sober have made me like him much more. In the earlier stories he is much more selfish and enjoying his life of wine, woman and well not song, but gambling and drugs. He's grown a lot and he has a chance with a woman who he's nuts about.

I found that this story was better than previous Ablow books that I have read. The plot is complex and devious and, as in all good thrillers, the story is not resolved until the last few pages.

However, a niggling point is the lack of attention to English grammar that cropped up in the book in a few places. No doubt Dr Ablow would label me as 'anal' in my need for accuracy, but I despair that a well-educated author, much less a well-trained editing and proof-reading team would approve of the following.

On a number of occasions we are treated to the very childish use of the very wrong following contraction: "should have" is contracted to "should of" when it should, of course be "should've". On other occasions "must've" is relaced with "must of", and so on. I don't know about American teachers, but it drives English teachers of language mental when they read this sort of sloppiness.

It's an insult to your readers, Dr Ablow, so I docked you a star from my rating.

I liked the story, I liked the pace and I especially liked that it was not overstuffed with too many details, that can make a book tedious to read. Liked all the characters except Billy. I would like to see a little more Anderson and McCormick and less Billy and his constant emotional trials which can be a bit boring. Enjoyable, quick read.

Apparently I'm in a minority but, yawn, it was so tedious. I found the descriptions of where 'we were' to be sparse, almost nonexistent. Maybe they're in other novels. Boston is a helluva city. Read Spenser. Boston is like a fifth character, another subplot. You're there, man.

One reviewer commented that Clevenger appeared to be on the phone all the time. That was my read as well.

I recognize that Kellerman and White have made the forensic psychiatric murder milieu a virtual cottage industry. Maybe that's my problem. I don't get into it. Seems too unbelivable. All those patients. All those murders. Whatever.

So my take was it was tedious, I didn't "feel" the environment, and I found the tricking of guilty people to be, incredible. As in not credible. 2 stars. Larry Scantlebury

HAVE YOU READ A COMPELLING NOVEL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE LATELY?? If you are seeking substance and suspense, THIS author is for you!! This thriller has prize-winner written all over it. Warning: you will be rushing out to purchase all this author's satisfying previous narratives!

I watched Keith Ablow on the Oprah show and found that I agreed with much that he was saying. I had tuned in late and so I didn't realize that he was a Forensic Psychiatrist. In fact, I didn't even realize that he was a published author. After the show was over, I looked him up and to my delight he had written a number of books - mysteries. I ordered two of his books, then ordered two more and then with delight ordered two more books, the Architect and Murder/Suicide.... as you can tell, I enjoyed them all - however, Murder/Suicide was just perfect. I could see his progress as a writer - and that book was all over the place in a manner that my mind just loves. I am a retired addiciton counselor, and so there is another point of view that is very appealing to me. Following all this I realized that there was the Scott Peterson book...I ordered it, even though I have had enough of Peterson's life and found it to be less interesting, however, that may be more subjective than not....and then I found his first book...about the death of a friend of his.....
All I can say is I very much enjoy his writing and his view of people.... Keep up the good work, I say and that's my story and I'm sticking to it....

Keith Ablow is a new author for me....Found The Architech at a thrift shop. Was fascinated with it and ordered Murder-Suicide from Amazon, and am almost finished. This is an author that I want to read ALL of his novels !.