Murder Suicide: A Novel [Hardcover]

Keith Ablow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

The only forensic psychiatrist writing suspense, Keith Ablow is being hailed as the heir to Thomas Harris.

Keith Ablow's novels delve deep into that dark and deadly place that Ablow, one of the nation's leading forensic psychiatrists, knows best: the psyche of a killer. Ablow has explored the catacombs of the criminal mind to find out what makes them tick, and he brings that expertise to his new novel, a chilling and emotionally compelling story of the lengths to which one man will go to leave his own life behind.

In Murder Suicide, Ablow and his alter-ego, Dr. Frank Clevenger, return to take on a murder case like no other. John Snow is a brilliant inventor who has made millions from his genius in aeronautics. He has everything a man could desire: wealth, family, even a beautiful mistress. But he also has a brain disease, a rare form of epilepsy, that threatens his most valuable possession -- his mind. Only one doctor may be able to cure it surgically, but at a terrible cost, one that Snow reveals to no one: Snow will have no memory whatsoever of his past - of its emotional entanglements or its secrets. He will be abandoning everyone he has ever known. But the night before he is scheduled to undergo the operation, he is found near the Massachusetts General Hospital, dead of a gunshot wound. Did he commit suicide, as the police suspect - or was he murdered?

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger delves into Snow's complex past and tortured relationships to unlock the identity of Snow's killer: Was it the wife who can never forgive what he's done to their child and their marriage, the son who loathes him, the beautiful mistress who loves him so deeply but can never have him, or the business partner intent on taking control of his inventions?

Only Frank Clevenger can unlock the door to Snow's startling past. And only Keith Ablow can take readers even further into the mind of a killer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Number five in Ablow's Dr. Frank Clevenger series (after 2003's Psychopath) continues the forensic psychiatrist's insightful investigations into intricate and deadly puzzles. Called in by a stumped Boston police department, Clevenger applies his skills to the mystery surrounding genius inventor John Snow, who is found shot outside Massachusetts General Hospital just an hour before he is to undergo experimental brain surgery. The police want Clevenger to determine if the death is murder or suicide. When Snow's lover, Grace Baxter, is found several days later with a slashed throat and wrists, the question surfaces again. Clevenger is a meticulous procedural investigator; he and partner North Anderson follow each and every lead to its logical, if sometimes tedious, conclusion. Clevenger's métier is interviewing suspects, and there's a surplus of them as family, friends and enemies, any one of whom could have killed the eccentric Snow, parade through the pages. Clevenger's problematic personal life is again examined in detail: adopted 18-year-old Billy is still challenging Clevenger's shaky parenting skills, and Clevenger's love affair with FBI chief forensic psychiatrist Whitney McCormick is always on-again, off-again. Drugs and alcohol, two other demons from his past, wait in the wings. Clevenger agonizes over all of this while methodically solving the riddle of Snow's murder, playing each of the suspects against the other until he tricks a confession out of the guilty party. While the excitement is not exactly pulse pounding, Clevenger puts in some solid sleuthing, and the low body count is refreshing amid a sea of frenetic thrillers in which victims number in double digits.
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Review

MURDER SUICIDE
"Murder Suicide poses intriguing questions...When Clevenger calls everyone into the room at the end, his solution and its surprising twist reminds us of the best of Rex Stout's master-manipulator, Nero Wolfe. And that's only one of the good reasons to pick up this tightly plotted book."-San Antonio Express News

PSYCHOPATH
"A superior read."-Entertainment Weekly

"Dr. Frank Clevenger, forensic psychiatrist and (somewhat reluctant) crime-solver, is quickly becoming one of the genre's most intriguing protagonists...A strange and hypnotic thriller...fascinating."-Booklist

"A tour de force. Ablow is not satisfied with the superficial. He digs deep to create complex characters."-Orlando Sentinel

COMPULSION
"Keith Ablow is king of the psychological thriller. Frank Clevenger is a wonderfully flawed hero, as haunted by his own demons as the sociopaths he faces. Ablow writes like a man possessed - with a pace so blistering the pages will all but singe your hands."-Dennis Lehane, author of MYSTIC RIVER

"COMPULSION is another really good book by Keith Ablow: compelling, graceful, and nearly impossible to put down."-Robert Parker, author of WIDOW'S WALK

"Utterly compelling...a roller coaster of a mystery with hairpin twists and turns that shock and astonish. No one burrows into the darkest recesses of the human mind as deeply as Keith Ablow."-Tess Gerritsen, author of THE SURGEON

"Keith Ablow's setting is the darkest of all-the twists and turns of the human mind. COMPULSION is-pardon the obvious pun-compulsive reading. Great Psychological suspense."-Harlan Coben, author of GONE FOR GOOD

"Keith Ablow is a master of psychological suspense. This is a dark, taut, terrifying novel, driven by a talented psychiatrist's insights into the human condition. Stoke up the fire, curl up with COMPULSION, and be prepared for a sleepless night."-Michael Palmer, author of FATAL

"Psychiatrist Frank Clevenger is a hero with heart, soul -- and brains. Fast-paced and frightening, Compulsion is a novel that explores the very nature of evil itself."-Janet Evanovich, author of TEN BIG ONES

"From the first sentence to the last, Compulsion is mesmerizing. A tense and sexy thriller...featuring an utterly shocking, yet thoroughly convincing family of fiends. A tense and sexy thriller stocked to the brim with juicy characters...With deft intelligence, Ablow maps the torturous terrain of the darkest regions of the human heart."-James Hall, author of BLACKWATER SOUND

"This series just keeps getting better. Frank Clevenger is a real original: a jeans-clad, black-turtleneck-wearing head shaven loner whose compassion for victims of violent crimes - and the perpetrators of those crimes - threatens to destroy him. Whether Clevenger is entirely fictional, or a reflection of his creator's dark side (Ablow is a practicing forensic psychiatrist; the upshot is the same: he's a brilliant creation and this is a brilliant novel."-Booklist (starred)

"The present is wounded by the past in an expertly judged psychological thriller ...a solid satisfying case."-Kirkus Reviews

"Action nimbly shifts from gritty urban Boston to window-dressed Nantucket, and the people and politics are realistically portrayed, including the ballsy but deeply flawed protagonist...this one scores as a great psychological mind-bender."--Publisher's Weekly

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0641676921
• ISBN-13: 978-0312323899
• ASIN: 0312323891
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #681,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not As Good as Psychopath, June 27, 2004

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, July 24, 2004

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, September 22, 2005

By 

Cory D. Slipman (Rockville Centre, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.