Murder on Broadway - Hardcover

Edward I. Koch

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1575660490 ISBN 13: 9781575660493

Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp, 1996

Synopsis

When Conor Matthews, the star of The Last Laugh, is murdered during the tenth anniversary performance of Broadway's longest running musical, mayor-turned-sleuth Ed Koch sets out to find the killer before he or she can make an encore performance.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

How's he doin'? He's gettin' closer. In his second appearance, New York City mayor-for-life Ed Koch shows more life than he did in Murder at City Hall. Among the audience at the Broadway musical, The Last Laugh, Koch and his friend, newspaper gossip columnist Sybil Baker, see lead actor Conor Matthews shot?as he is every night in the play. Only this time the gun isn't shooting blanks. Another homicide right in front of His Honor, the Mayor. Koch combines his street smarts and mayoral connections as he hunts for the murderer. The Last Laugh, he learns, hasn't been selling well lately, and it wouldn't be beyond its vainglorious composer, Nolan MacDougall, to stage a murder to help the box office. Or might Beau Walton, the previous lead who left for Hollywood but can't get arrested?as an actor?want his old part back? With Sybil supplying the inside scoop, Koch casts a suspicious eye on Matthews's fiancee, Kellie Farrell, who played the female lead, and her new lover, Wesley Fink, the actor who fired the fatal shot. And what exactly do all those books by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Plath in Matthews's dressing room mean anyway? Although this effort is a step up from his first, readers will still wish for more undiluted Koch and his take on the streets of New York in the next installment.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An unexpected thrill for the jaded audience on hand for the tenth anniversary gala of Nolan MacDougall's musical The Last Laugh: When jealous Wesley Fisk shoots leading man Conor Matthews in the last act, the bullets are real. New York's finest take leading lady Kellie Farrell, whose engagement to Matthews didn't prevent her from warming Fisk's sheets, for the perp. But Fisk has an equally strong motive, too, as do Matthews's understudy Jonathan Patrelli, hungry for his own chance on the Great White Way, and Matthews's predecessor Beau Walton, whose defection to Hollywood has been such a thumping failure that he'd love to be back in the cast. Luckily, towering over all these petty puppets is that paragon of big-city mayors, Ed Koch, who's unfailingly caring, sincere, considerate of his many underlings, and a whiz of an amateur sleuth, with a gimlet eye for everybody's vanities but his own. ``When I'm wrong, I'm always willing to admit it,'' says Koch, but he never has to admit it, because the police are even more baffled by the slender mystery than he is. Coauthor Staub, batting for Herbert Resnicow (Murder at City Hall, 1995), doesn't bring much to the party, so the field is wide open for Koch's inimitably self-aggrandizing charm. Your move. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1575660490
• ISBN 13: 9781575660493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182