Customer Reviews

Semantics of Murder

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Picked this book up over Thanksgiving and read it cover to cover. It was either the book or sports on TV. The book easily won. Couldn't wait to put the turkey down and get back to it. It's not a fast read, but it is one of the few intelligent fiction novels out there today - and its not totally fiction - which makes it even more intriguing and difficult to put down.

Don't wait for next year's Thanksgiving Day to buy the book - get it now and reaad a book you'll actually enjoy.

This novel started off a little slow but picks up in the end and there is a psychologically disturbing ending. It is a fun read for a weekend. I got interested in this book from my interests in the person who's murder its plot is based on, the UCLA philosopher Richard Montague who was murdered in his home during the early seventies. To this day, his murder is still unsolved. This novel takes off on the psychological themes of familial disconnect and fraternal rivalry and weaves a somewhat interesting account of a murder and those lives intimately associated with it.

Cocky American Dr. Jay Hamilton moves from Los Angeles to London where he practices psychoanalysis in Kensington. His affluent clientele worship by him and his practice is thriving. However, they are ignorant that Dr. Hamilton has an alter ego.

As J Merritt, he writes stories about psychological analysis that is major sellers. His subjects are the clients he treats as Dr, Hamilton. He also has his own psychotic secret, the murder of his beloved older brother Robert, who raised him. Biographer Dana Flynn visits Jay to interview him about a book she is writing about Robert that leads to an abashed Jay questioning his ethics for using his clients especially Cora as the subjects of his books.

The Semantics of Murder is an intriguing look at ethics as Dana's inquiries into Jay's late hero Robert coaxes him to take a discerning gaze into what he is doing. Robert, who was much older, was more a caring father than a sibling; thus Jay has the epiphany that Robert disappointingly stares down at him. Although the action is minimal, fans who relish a cerebral character driven tale will enjoy Jays' morale reawakening.

Harriet Klausner

Jay Hamilton is a 51-year-old West London psychoanalyst who, unknown to his 'clients' [as they apparently, since he is not a doctor, cannot be called 'patients'], has made the stories of several of them the basis for his fictional forays, having already published successful commercial novels. Jay is planning a new book, comprised of eleven short stories based upon selected case histories. But he has now become a source for another writer, a young woman who is writing a biography of Jay's brother, Robert, older than him by eighteen years and a brilliant professor of mathematical linguistics at UCLA who was a murder victim at age 41.

Ten years later, Jay had left Southern California for good, and must now revisit in his mind that harrowing time so that he can regurgitate those memories for author Dana Flynn. "In December 1971, at the age of twenty-three, Jay found he'd buried his entire family in the space of two years." His thoughts run thus: "Jay could not be sure if these were memories at all, or if it was just the absence of presence that he remembered, all the things that didn't happen, walking scrub-kneed to church on Sundays alongside the click of his mother's unaccompanied heels, past other families who made a perfect set, when the Hamiltons had a missing piece, a father who wasn't dead, only unaccountably absent. A deserter." Those few lines should provide a glimpse of the quality of writing which is in store for the reader.

According to an author's note, the book is based on the real-life murder in 1971 of a brilliant and controversial UCLA Professor of Philosophy, unsolved to date, who was "apparently gay, highly promiscuous and had a particular preference for rough sex with black guys," at least two of whom were thought to have strangled him to death in his own home. And this is the likely scenario of how the fictional Robert Hamilton died.

The book, fittingly for one where a main character is a semantics and linguistics luminary, is only nominally a murder mystery, and for about the first hundred pages is elegant in its language and the scope of its interest, including a page-long discussion of a book by Primo Levi, among other topics. It turns considerably darker in the last half of the book and became, for this reader, ultimately profoundly disturbing. Nonetheless, the prose is a joy to read, one I recommend you discover for yourself. The author, Irish by birth and now living in Sussex, England, speaks of being "bewitched by language," something certainly evident here and which will assuredly be experienced by the reader as well.