BEAR HUG - Softcover

Doolittle

3.65

17 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671745697 ISBN 13: 9780671745691

Publisher: Pocket, 1993

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When Dr. Denton Somerville's Sunbanc Savings and Loan crumbles, several Boston retirees hire Tom Bethany to investigate, and soon Bethany must contend with Somerville's slippery partner, a formidable U.S. Attorney, and a corrupt judge. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Jerome Doolittle is a former Washington Post editor and columnist, U.S. Embassy spokesman in Laos, war correspondent in Southeast Asia, Chief of Public Affairs for the Federal Aviation Authority, speechwriter for President Carter, and Harvard faculty member. In addition to the Tom Bethany mysteries, he is the author of The Bombing Officer, a novel of wartime Laos.

These are the opening pages of Bear Hug:

It was what would have been the mud season up in the Champlain Valley, that time when winter hasn't gone out yet and spring hasn't come in yet. The farm machinery has long since been repaired and is all ready to go, but you still can't get in the ground to plant, and it looks like winter is never going to end. There's not a damned thing to do but kick the dog or whip your son or rape your daughter or beat your wife, or just shoot yourself and all of the above to death, and the final hell with everything.

Mud season is the biggest reason why the principal export of Port Henry, New York, is human beings. Every mud season I'm glad all over again that I joined the crowd as soon as I was old enough to enlist in the army. The army shipped me off to Laos, which was a lot of things, some good and some bad and some muddy. But even when it was muddy, it wasn't mud season.

It was never really mud season in Cambridge, either, even if there had been a certain amount of freezing and thawing in the February just ending. For the real thing you need a long, deep winter to freeze your brain solid right through. That way it cracks to pieces when the thaws come and go, just like the roads in the north country do. Cambridge is too near the sea for that kind of weather, too far south.

Still, it was pretty lousy out. At seven-thirty the sun may have been up there somewhere, but it wasn't getting through the clouds. The snow had melted, exposing all the street crud built up over the last two or three months. Whenever the weather got around to drying up, the litter would start to blow around and call attention to itself. For the moment, though, it was plastered onto the wet pavement like just another part of it. Cold rain had been gusting on and off all night.

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