Consider The Alternative (Wwl Mystery, 464) - Softcover

Marcuse, Irene

2.77

13 ratings by Goodreads

9780373264643: Consider The Alternative (Wwl Mystery, 464)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037326464X ISBN 13: 9780373264643

Publisher: Worldwide Library, 2003

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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. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Irene Marcuse worked as a social worker before becoming a full-time writer. The granddaughter of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, she lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband and daughter. Hale has also published two other novels from her Anita Servi series, The Death of an Amiable Child and Guilty Mind. Visit her website at www.marcuse.org/irene

From Publishers Weekly:

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.
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