Epitaph
   James Siegel
  2001 TimeWarner Books
    ISBN: 0892967129


William Riskin, a former member of the Three Eyes Detective Agency, is now in his 70s & decades removed from his stock in trade divorce cases. When he spots an obituary of his onetime partner, he pays his respects at the funeral home where he is drawn into his partner's last case. William decides to follow the trail & unearths a terrible crime committed half a century ago, half a world away & its modern counterpart.

Epitaph is James Siegel's first mystery & what a thriller it is! In a dreamy, meditative narrative, filled with personal asides & geriatric comedy squeezed from years of surviving, this author's hero sets out to do something heroic, something honorable, something that might bring closure to his antagonism with the deceased, only to find himself tottering at the brink of danger in a perplexing & lethal hunt.

William Riskin is an old fogey -- full of memories, self-mockery & self-pity until he stumbles upon the deadly case his old-time partner, Jean Goldblum, was working on. His partner was from Paris, France of the pre-WWII years with a history veiled & dark that only one other person in all of America knows about. William is about to meet that person & find out more than he cares to know about this partner who dealt him such a blow so many years ago.

With a curious & tantalizing view of life from the rocking chair of retirement, James Siegel weaves a horrid, humorous & taut tale of desperate times feeding desperate hungers; of innocence masking simple evil; of senior citizens in a free country being lethally hoodwinked by perpetrators from an oppressed society.

Epitaph is not just a good mystery, not just a good thriller -- it is a work of fast & funny, fast & furious deception even as the hero walks the slow pace of the aged & infirm even as his mind races a mile a minute!

A memorable first book & very well written! Do catch my Interview with James Siegel -- it's well worth it!
(09/23/01)

Rebecca