2/17/12

Book of the Week #7

Birds of Prey by Lawrence Kinsman (Manchester, NH: The Abelard Press, 2002)

I seem to be on a bit of a mystery kick--admittedly not an uncommon situation. This novel by Manchester author Lawrence Kinsman, formerly a professor at Southern NH University, follows Boston homicide detective Sylvie Kaplan as she tracks a killer (or perhaps killers) through a maze of international crime, computer hacking, and defense contractors.

"At what feels like dawn I am awakened by the sound of a light tapping on my apartment door. The tapping goes on and on, slowly insinuating itself into the unhappy grayness of my sleeping mind. When I sit up amidst the scrambled bedclothes, my head begins throbbing. I squeeze my eyes shut and press the heels of my hands to my temples, like a woman driven mad by inner voices.
This stupendous headache is the direct result of several glasses of excellent dinner wine, mixed with two or three glasses of even better champagne, and topped off by three glasses of cheap sherry that I drank while sitting in the kitchen at about 1:00 a.m., feeling sorry for myself. The sherry came after my return from last evening's big Boston Police Holiday Gala, a bizarrely opulent event unlike any other gathering in the hotdog and Budweiser-ridden social history of the Boston Police Department. Upon my return to the house at midnight, I learned that my handsome, rich, narcissistic bastard of a fiance had left me." (p. 1)

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