The Wish to Kill - Hardcover

Hannah, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471770 ISBN 13: 9781569471777

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Dr. Alex Kertesz is a biochemist. Handsome, popular - with everyone except his flamboyant wife - and brilliant, he is the opposite of Professor Ilan Falk, whose body he discovers one night in a University of Jerusalem laboratory. He had just been wishing that Falk would "go to hell." And then there was an explosion. The dead man was inclined to be careless. And lighting a cigar in a lab would be nothing short of suicidal. Was Falk's death the result of an accident?
Falk had many enemies for whom his demise was uncannily timely. One, his beautiful lab assistant, Shoshana, confides her worry to Alex. At the moment of the accident she, too, had been wishing Falk dead. And her wish had been detailed: she was thinking "He could easily heave the gas on some day and light one of those smelly cigars. Wouldn't that be great!" Alex, the paradigmatic rational scientist, is forced to consider the possibility that wishes might actually be able to kill.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Hannah works at the University of Jerusalem as a biochemist.

Reviews

How's this for instant gratification? Seconds after Alex Kertsz, junior lecturer at the University of Jerusalem's microbiology lab, mutters ``Go to hell!'' to his absent senior colleague, Prof. Ilan Falk, Ilan is blown up by his own cigar, which ignites the gas that's been leaking into his neighboring lab. And Alex, impatient with Ilan for muscling in on his research project and then dilly-dallying over publishing the results, isn't the only person who wished Ilan dead. There's Ilan's son Oded, whose father had resolved a little quarrel over the family car Oded had taken without permission by reporting it stolen. There's Prof. Elisha Tal, the biochemist Ilan had accused of faking the results that won him a prize. Most intriguingly, there's Ilan's research assistant Shosh, who wished he'd leave the gas on someday and light it up with one of his stinky cigars, and then dreamed his death the night before he died. So whodunit? That's a question that has to take a backseat to a parade of characters too faceless to be called suspects, several fervently described biochemical experiments and reports, and ``strikingly handsome'' Alex's constant fretting over the artist wife who keeps flirting with him even though she no longer loves him, and half a dozen other women who flirt with him for reasons of their own. A first novel whose people and prose alike are too affectless for moral outrage or emotional engagementleaving only the well-drawn Jerusalem backdrops as a plus. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

First-novelist Hannah has hit upon an engaging premise: a mystery series starring a research scientist working at the University of Jerusalem. Alex Kertesz is a handsome DNA researcher with a bad marriage, a good kid, and a lab full of in-fighting colleagues. When one of the latter is killed in an explosion in his lab, the official verdict is accidental death, but Alex is intrigued by the testimony of another colleague that she has the power to wish someone dead. This bit of mysticism troubles the scientist and prompts him to launch an investigation. Hannah throws multiple balls into the air here, and although she manages to catch only a few of them, most readers will cut her a little slack. She has the makings of a good series: a sympathetic hero and an intriguing, nicely evoked setting (both Jerusalem and the research lab). Her failings--leaving subplots dangling, failing to develop the "wish to kill" idea--are remediable with experience. Give Alex Kertesz a chance; not every experiment works the first time. Bill Ott

Much of this unusual first novel in a new series centers around the unscientific notion that malicious thoughts can cause a person's demise. After a particularly hateful professor at the University of Jerusalem dies in a supposed biochemistry lab accident, a lab neighbor, Alex Kertesz, discovers that several peopleAhimself includedAwished the man dead. Alex begins a rather meandering investigation into the professor's death, eventually trapping another scientist in attempted murder. Alex's home life, meanwhile, presents unique challenges. Lacking the intensity of most murder mysteries, this book instead focuses on mood and atmosphere. For larger collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569471770
• ISBN 13: 9781569471777
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228