True Crime by Michael Mewshaw. New York. 1991. Poseidon Press. 0671732048. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.
DESCRIPTION - Tom Heller is a true-crime writer. His specialty: family murders. When his own father - poor, alcoholic, and a source of unresolved guilt and shame to his successful son - is brutally slain in his rundown Maryland home, Tom returns to make his own investigation. Soon there are two more victims: the father and son of Tom's college girlfriend are found murdered on their exclusive estate. Tom sees almost immediately what the police can't: the murders are linked. And it is this link that will carry Tom twenty years into his past to come face to face with the emotional traumas he has run from - his rivalry with his brother whose help he now needs, the calculated cynicism of his own career, and the impossible love of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks for a rich and privileged woman. Dangerous passions are reignited, and as Tom replays his doomed romance he himself becomes a suspect in murder. In this masterly story of murder and money, love and family, Mewshaw brilliantly combines the authenticity and detail of non-fiction with the inventive power and range of the novel, and portrays a tidewater region - from the Washington D.C., area slums to the posh shores of Chesapeake Bay - as immediate and vital as Robert B. Parker's Boston or Tony Hillerman's Arizona.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Mewshaw (born February 19, 1943) is an American author of 11 novels and 8 books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviewer, and tennis reporter. His novel YEAR OF THE GUN was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer in 1991. He is married with two sons. Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's longtime ‘voice of books,' has called him ‘the best novelist in America that nobody knows. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland, Mewshaw graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland (1965), then was granted a four-year fellowship to attend the graduate writing program at the University of Virginia, where he attained his Masters (1966) and Doctorate (1970) degrees under the tutelage of George Garrett. While studying at UVA, Mewshaw completed two unpublished novels, then embarked on a road trip across Mexico with his wife (at the urging of William Styron, who was the subject of his masters thesis and doctoral dissertation); a journey which would form the basis of his first novel MAN IN MOTION (1970), which he completed while on a Fulbright Fellowship in France. Mewshaw taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and subsequently was named Director of Creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking leaves of absence every other year from this post, Mewshaw based himself in Rome, Italy, and continued traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. While Mewshaw researched his third novel THE TOLL (1974) in Marrakesh, Morocco, his wife Linda was hired as Lindsay Wagner's stand-in on the set of Robert Wise's film Two People. Mewshaw's experience of that shoot was the jumping-off point for his fifth novel LAND WITHOUT SHADOW (1979).
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