Blood in the Water

Starred review from January 16, 2012
Edgar-finalist Haddam shows no sign of creative fatigue in her baffling 27th whodunit featuring ex-FBI agent turned police consultant Gregor Demarkian (after 2011’s Flowering Judas). One night at Waldorf Pines, a gated Philadelphia suburb, Arthur Heydreich, whose unfaithful wife, Martha, has disappeared, stumbles on a corpse in the community swimming pool, just when the pool house goes up in flames. The body in the pool is that of Martha’s teenage lover, Michael Platte. Charred human remains discovered in the pool house are presumed to be Martha’s, until DNA analysis proves they’re male. The local eccentric police chief, who originally thought Arthur murdered Martha and Michael, calls in Gregor to make sense of the case. Few readers will reach the answer to this crafty puzzle before the endearing and brilliant sleuth, or tease out the significance of the clue of the extra garden hose. Agent: Don Maass, Donald Maass Literary Agency.

March 15, 2012
You probably don't know the neighbors as well as you think you do--not when they're this full of surprises. Everybody in Waldorf Pines, a gated community aspiring to be ritzy, knows everything there is to know about everybody else: Which wife is bedding the pool boy, which resident makes a nuisance of himself with ridiculous complaints, which old biddies are lesbians and which teenager is a bona fide sociopath. So when that pool boy is found dead in the pool and another body is burned to ashes in the woman's locker room, the result of a fire that incinerated most of the building, everyone, including the local cop, assumes that Arthur Heydreich, the cuckolded husband, did it. Immediately arrested, he must be released when DNA indicates that the ashes are those of a man. Where then is his wife? Has she committed a double homicide? And why? Gregor Demarkian, the Armenian Hercule Poirot called in to make sense of matters, immediately realizes that misdirection is the key to understanding the mystery. Accordingly, he chats up the Waldorf Pines citizenry and uncovers many assumed identities, much blackmailing, quite a few red herrings and a plot twist so convoluted that even Demarkian's hyper-smart wife Bennis can't quite follow it. Not top-of-the-line Haddam (Flowering Judas, 2011, etc.) but still enjoyable, like a night out doing nothing special with old friends.

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March 1, 2012

Ex-FBI agent Gregor Demarkian (Flowering Judas) investigates a high-society double homicide that baffles the Philadelphia cops. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/11.]

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