As Anita Servi continues to struggle to help the many citizens in need in Manhattan, she finds herself in embroiled in murder as she looks into the killing of an elderly friend while another ailing friend confronts the truth of her own mortality.

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Consider The Alternative
Publisher: Walker & Co.
Publication Date: 2002
Language: English
ISBN 10: 0802733778
ISBN 13: 9780802733771
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Collectible-Like New

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Agatha nominee Marcuse's third Anita Servi mystery (after 2001's Guilty Mind) works better as a straight novel than as a whodunit. Servi, an unemployed social worker, lucks into a new job near her home on Manhattan's Upper West Side only to find on her first day of work that her boss has taken her own life, apparently inspired by the Hemlock Society's famous guide, Final Exit. This disturbing incident proves to be the first of many. The retired cop who serves as chief of security for the apartment complex where Servi now works alerts her to an alarming increase in the death rate among the elderly residents over the past year. Suggestively, several of the deceased committed suicide using the Hemlock Society's methods. The plot enables Marcuse to explore, albeit with less depth and emotion than one might expect given the author's own professional background in eldercare, the morality of assisted suicide and the conflict between personal ethical standards and the needs of a loved one. It comes as little surprise that the deaths merit further inquiry, and there are too few characters with plausible motives to make the identity of the criminal a real puzzler. The amateurish nature of Servi's sleuthing makes the unresolved ending plausible, but still not satisfying. Her relationships with her husband and almost legally adopted nine-year-old daughter are warmly and convincingly portrayed, but any mystery whose climax seems borrowed from an episode of Murder, She Wrote is bound to disappoint.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Anita Servi's social work position, serving the elderly for St. John the Divine, has disappeared. So she's eager to begin her new job at Neighbors Aiding Neighbors (NAN) in the subsidized housing of Monument Estates, just south of Harlem and full of the elderly. On her first day, however, she discovers the body of the woman who hired her, a suicide ostensibly because she was despondent over her inability to conceive a child. The method used was one outlined in a well-known guide to suicide that many of the elders served by NAN had read and studied. Similar suicides follow thick and fast, and Anita puzzles out their relationship to each other only slowly. The rich personalities of the elders here, as well as Anita's own family--her cabinetmaker spouse and their nine-year-old, Clea, still not quite adopted--match the rich New York ambience, from Mama Joy's Deli to the Vermont Christmas tree sellers who set up on Broadway each December. This one's a bit more ruminative than the previous titles in the series but no less absorbing and city focused. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved

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