Sympathy Between Humans - Hardcover

Compton, Jodi

3.56

375 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385337140 ISBN 13: 9780385337144

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 2005

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Jodi Compton’s debut, The 37th Hour, was hailed as “compelling” (San Francisco Chronicle), “intelligent” (New York Times Book Review), and “the debut of a world-class mystery writer” (Denver Post). Now Compton delivers a new novel featuring Detective Sarah Pribek, one of the most singular and complex characters in suspense fiction today.

On the streets of Minneapolis, Sarah has worked everything from vice to missing persons. But six months after the death of a small-town criminal in rural Minnesota, Sarah is still protecting the identity of a killer. And now a zealous D.A.’s investigator has come to town, determined to make an arrest. With her ex-partner half a world away and her husband in prison, only Sarah remains to face the consequences of last fall. Surrounded by colleagues who know her to be the suspect in a murder, Sarah keeps her demons at bay by involving herself in the troubles of strangers. Seventeen-year-old Aidan Hennessy was banished from his family by his father. Now Aidan’s twin sister is desperately searching for the brother she hasn’t seen in years. Although the case is out of Sarah’s jurisdiction, she sees a reflection of herself in the troubled, damaged family, and agrees to investigate.

As she probes into their tangled history, Sarah begins to realize that the mystery of the Hennessys runs deeper than it appears. Then Sarah’s lieutenant gives her a simpler assignment: Track down a doctor rumored to be practicing medicine without a license in a housing project. But in Cicero Ruiz, Sarah finds a tough, wounded survivor whose moral code challenges her own ideas about justice...and whose hard-won life would be destroyed by an arrest.

Now juggling two very different cases, both requiring a delicate balancing act between professional honor and personal feelings, Sarah soon has even more at stake. Caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with the investigator who wants to end her career, crossing one ethical line after another, Sarah increasingly fears that a misstep on her part will end not only in her disgrace, but in the death of one of those she has promised herself to protect.
With its fascinating heroine and its brilliantly interwoven mysteries, Sympathy Between Humans is storytelling at its finest from one of the most original and daring writers in suspense fiction today.

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Review:

Sarah Pribek, a Minneapolis missing persons detective, is under suspicion. Investigated but not yet charged in the arson murder of the man who raped and killed her best friend's daughter, she's protecting the identity of the real perpetrator, even though a zealous prosecutor is closing in and threatening to indict her. With her husband in jail in Wisconsin for a crime related to the same case (only alluded to briefly here, but fully explicated in The 37th Hour, the first in the series featuring Pribek), the detective finds herself involved in two other assignments where the line between justice and the law is also murky. When the eldest daughter of reclusive novelist Hugh Hennessy enlists her aid in finding the twin brother mysteriously sent away by her father several years earlier, Sarah agrees to investigate, even though there's no indication that Aidan Hennessy left his last foster home except of his own volition, and as far as Sarah can detrermine, the 17-year-old has committed no crimes. When the elder Hennessy is felled by a stroke, Sarah finds herself appointed as temporary guardian of his children, at least until Marlinchen, the daughter, comes of age and can be appoointed their guardian and Hugh's conservator. And the more time Sarah spends with the family, the more certain she is that Aidan isn't who he and his siblings think he is, although she's reluctant to add to the family's travails by seeking the evidence to support her hunch.

She's just as hesitant to make an arrest in her other case--that of a charismatic quadriplegic suspected of practicing medicine illegally. Sarah's relationship with Cisco Ruiz is a complex one, and in the telling of it, Compton brings into sharp relief the moral quandaries that challenge her protagonist. This is a well-plotted mystery with characters who resonate in the reader's consciousness long after the last page is turned, intelligently plotted and deftly crfafted. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

Jodi Compton lives in California. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The 37th Hour, which also features Detective Sarah Pribek and is available in paperback from Dell.

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