Act of Darkness by Jane Haddam. This book has been sitting in my real, physical To Be Read pile. There is a virtual pile in my head that doesn't bear thinking about, but the physical pile is, if not exactly manageable, at least not mind-boggling. But I've been putting off reading it because I do love the Gregor Demarkian mysteries and I know they grow deeper and more thoughtful as time goes along so I have a great deal of good reading ahead of me, but not enough.
Jane Haddam, whose real name is Oriana Papazoglou, which I like a lot more than her pseudonym, has written 27 of these books, originally called the Holiday Series because the stories took place on holidays: Christmas, Easter (Western, Roman Catholic), and in Act of Darkness, the 4th of July. The next book will take place on Halloween, and the next on St Patrick's Day, and then on Thanksgiving. The books have themes of social criticism, the one at Easter being a discussion of the church and this one being about politicians.
Gregor Demarkian, the Armenian Hercule Poirot as Time Magazine has called him, goes off to Long Island at the beginning of this book with his friend Bennis Hannaford, whom he met in the first mystery, to a fund raising "seminar" at the house of "the last of the real actresses," an Elizabeth Taylor-like woman who is doing this to raise money for her son-in-law, a US senator from Connecticut. Demarkian has been asked to attend by an old friend at the FBI for reasons he is finding difficult to understand.
The senator, Stephen Whistler Fox, and his wife, Janet, were the parents 10 years earlier of a baby with Down's Syndrome. Fox and his college friend Kevin Debrett, who delivered the baby, were purportedly so affected by the child's death they have devoted themselves to passing legislation which will aid in the care of children with Down's and in Debrett's case, running a clinic to deal with the many illnesses such children are prone to and not incidentally making a lot of money. Since a major piece of legislation is about to be proposed, a lobbyist for a union of workers who care for mentally retarded children is also there, hoping to influence the legislation, which was in part written by Debrett to favor private clinics like his.
The sleazy people in this book happen to be Democrats but that is, I think, a function of the time it was written (it was published in 1991.) It's politicians in general the author is after and the kinds of corruption that occur on both sides of the aisle, and she has some sharp things to say about Republicans and conservatives as well. The author does create a hilarious knee-jerk liberal who relies on her astrologer and meditation to decide everything from what to have for breakfast to whether to pull the plug on her hospitalized mother, who was not in a coma or near death but rather had broken her hip. She is entirely unable to understand why anyone would criticize this euthanasia. "She was old. Why would she want to live?"
I knew from the very beginning who did it, why, and how. Unfortunately, when I got to the end of the book I discovered I was wrong. Which pleased me. It was a convoluted plot with many possible murderers and many possible motives, not to mention a mysterious method of actually committing the murders, all wrapped in a very amusing package. This is a first-rate mystery.
2010 No 31
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