Impulse

Frank Smith, famed writer of murder mysteries, boards Southwest Airlines heading from Phoenix to Baltimore. His goal is his 50th class reunion at Scott Academy, but behind him he leaves the highly suspicious disappearance of his wife into apparent thin air four years ago and the relentless quest of Officer Ledezma whose impulse is that Smith has killed her and buried the body.

Starred Review. At the start of Ramsey's superb, perfectly paced stand-alone, Phoenix mystery writer Frank Smith heads for his 50th prep school reunion—at Scott Academy, near Baltimore—anxious about all the attendant grudges, passions, jealousies and nostalgia. More seriously, Smith must contend with the suicide of his brother, Jack, 50 years earlier; the disappearance of four teenage schoolboys during the 1980s; and, back home in Arizona, the relatively recent murder of his wife, Sandy, a crime for which he's now the chief suspect. Ramsey (Artscape and Secrets) treats these traumas in a manner at once intriguing and believable yet somehow breezy and joyous. Seldom in crime fiction does one meet lead characters as likable as Smith and his long-lost friend/new love interest, Rosemary Mitchell. Both are "pushing seventy" but try to solve the various mysteries with the style, audacity and intelligence of a Sun City version of Nick and Nora Charles. Their senior viewpoint with commentary on various generations—"Greatest," Boomers, Xers—makes for a perspective that's at once tart, worldly and compassionate and that nicely balances the genuine evil in the air. (June)
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Partly to escape scrutiny by police, who suspect him of murdering his disappeared wife, mystery writer Frank Smith decides to attend the fiftieth reunion of Scott Academy--the place where he spent his childhood, where his father taught and he attended school, and where his younger brother committed suicide. At a cocktail party, he's challenged to solve a real-life mystery that occurred at the school----the 25-year-old disappearance of four students who were last seen in a wooded area on the school grounds, an area where Frank and his brother played as children. Unable to solve his wife's disappearance, he throws himself into this new crime. Playing Nora to his Nick is widowed Rosemary Mitchell, a friend from childhood, who helps Frank tie the present to the past and step toward the future. Wrapped in a mystery-frame story, this is a touching reflection on the changes that come with growing older in a society prejudiced against the elderly. Stephanie Zvirin
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