Book description
The past comes rearing up to bite the next generation when a son digs
too deep into his family's past....Martin Firestone can't figure why his
father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All
Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school. Then,
Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an
extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of
Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer
of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly
questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict,
black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents-all in a
day's work for Samuel Firestone, M. D. When Leo decided his father was
covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony,
followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they
ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the
time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old
heads, it was too late to call off the investigation. But there are
loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years
after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes
away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for. Taking a
break from his Thomas Purdue mysteries (The Midnight Special, etc.),
Karp moves from antiques to medicine in this sharp, well-written crime
novel. Martin Firestone, a computer technician, has decided to change
his life by attending medical school. When he tells his father, renowned
artist Leo Firestone, the elder Firestone reacts with tremendous anger.
Shocked at his father's reaction, Martin nevertheless stands his ground.
Leo then asks his son to meet him for lunch and proceeds to tell him
about his paternal grandfather. Dr. Samuel Firestone, Leo's father, was
a legend in Hobart, N. J., a doctor whom everyone-rich or poor-could
count on in an emergency. He had a sixth sense about medicine and made
house calls at any time of the day or night. Samuel Firestone also knew
the darkest secrets of everyone in his community, and when he took his
young son (Leo) on as an assistant, he inadvertently set a tragic series
of events in motion. Karp's story, steeped in descriptions of 1940s
smalltown life, builds to a shattering climax that will haunt readers as
much as the book's characters. Fans of Robin Cook or Patricia Cornwell
will find this mystery strikingly different, for it deals not in medical
science but in the frailty of human love and devotion. Larry Karp grew
up in Paterson, NJ and New York City. He practiced perinatal medicine
and wrote general nonfiction books and articles for 25 years, then, in
1994, left medical work to write mystery novels full-time. The
backgrounds and settings of Larry's mysteries reflect many of his
interests, including musical antiques, medical-ethical issues, and
ragtime music. His current book, The Ragtime Fool, the third work in a
ragtime mystery trilogy, centers on the work of ragtime revivalists
during a 1951 ceremony in Sedalia, MO, and the opposition the ragtimers
faced from bigots in that racially-divided time and place, Larry lives
with his wife Myra in Seattle; they have two grown children.
