Death Benefits: A Novel - Hardcover

Perry, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679453059 ISBN 13: 9780679453055

Publisher: Random House, 2001

Synopsis

When gruff and intimidating security consultant Max Stillman appears without warning in the San Francisco office of McClaren Life and Casualty and begins asking questions and scrutinizing files, the employees can't help wondering just which of them he's been hired to investigate. The first to find out is young data analyst John Walker when Stillman's mysterious investigation leads out of town, he announces he's taking Walker with him.

Walker has been picked because a colleague with whom he once had a love affair has disappeared after paying a very large death benefit to an impostor. Since Walker knew her intimately, Stillman believes he's likely to be useful in finding and convicting her. But because he knows her so well, Walker is convinced that she is innocent, and that he must join the pursuit so that he can defend her. These conflicting purposes unite Walker and Stillman in an urgent search that propels them across the country and into unexpected dangers. The trail ends in a deceptively peaceful corner of the New Hampshire countryside, where they find themselves trapped by a deadly conspiracy that's much bigger, older, and more evil than they could ever have imagined.

Martin Cruz Smith declared a previous Perry novel as beautifully crafted as a good automatic weapon. In Death Benefits, Perry gives us another stunning suspense story with writing that is, as the Los Angeles Times said, as sharp as a sushi knife.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. His other books include The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, Dance for the Dead, and Vanishing Act. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two daughters.

From the Back Cover

"Perry's writing is as sharp as a sushi knife."
Los Angeles Times, about Blood Money

"As beautifully crafted as a good automatic weapon."
Martin Cruz Smith, about Sleeping Dogs

"Perry is a master of nail-biting suspense."
Los Angeles Times, about The Face-Changers

"Dazzles like a house of mirrors."
Martha Grimes, about Shadow Woman

"Thomas Perry just keeps getting better."
Tony Hillerman, about Sleeping Dogs

"The momentum never flags, and the suspense constantly builds."
Booklist, about The Face-Changers

From the Inside Flap

nd intimidating security consultant Max Stillman appears without warning in the San Francisco office of McClaren Life and Casualty and begins asking questions and scrutinizing files, the employees can't help wondering just which of them he's been hired to investigate. The first to find out is young data analyst John Walker when Stillman's mysterious investigation leads out of town, he announces he's taking Walker with him.

Walker has been picked because a colleague with whom he once had a love affair has disappeared after paying a very large death benefit to an impostor. Since Walker knew her intimately, Stillman believes he's likely to be useful in finding and convicting her. But because he knows her so well, Walker is convinced that she is innocent, and that he must join the pursuit so that he can defend her. These conflicting purposes unite Walker and Stillman in an urgent search that propels them across the country and into unexpected dangers. The trail ends in a deceptively peaceful

Reviews

Perry (Blood Money; The Face Changers) serves up a clever entertainment (in the Graham Greene sense of the word) set in the high-stakes insurance world. After a deliberately ambiguous prologue (just why is Ellen Snyder going to an L.A. airport hotel before dawn?), we learn that Ellen, working out of the Pasadena office of a prestigious San Francisco insurance company called McClaren's, recently authorized a 12$- million death benefit payment to a man who turned out to be an imposter. Now both the imposter and Ellen have navished, and McClaren's has called in mysterious operative Max Stillman to investigate the apparent conspiracy to defraud. Stillman oh-so-deftly draws young John Walker, an analyst in the main San Francisco office, into the investigation. Walker cooperates with Stillman because he doesn't believe Ellens's guilty; he's still a little bit in love with her from their training class days, although Ellen's career plans left no room for more than a casual interoffice romance. Casual is the operative word here: a casual remark from Walker to an enigmatic computer hacker named Serena leads to a seriously steamy interlude. And casual is the best way to describe Perry's seemingly effortless method of developing character and building suspense. His style is so assured as to be invisible, seamlessly supplying plot and character information as the chase leads from California to Chicago, Miami and finally a small town in New Hampshire. Though the finale echoes the premise of a particular Dachiell Hammett story, everything else feels as fresh as dawn. (Jan. 16) Forecast: Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This is his finest novel yet and, if sold with enthusiasm, could chart significant numbers. The bold evocative, b&w jacket will help, as will the four-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here, Perry takes a break from Jane Whitefield. John Walker, who works for McClaren Life and Casualty, gets more than he bargained for when he is asked to investigate a large death benefit paid out to the wrong person.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edgar Award-winning Perry is the kind of writer who can make any subject enthralling. Here, he breathes excitement into the life of insurance agents, romance into examining columns of figures, and suspense into office cubicle life. Perry also debuts an unlikely but engaging pair of sleuths: hard-bitten, middle-age claims investigator Max Stillman and the just-out-of-college, appealingly confused young data analyst John Walker. Stillman is called into the home office of McClaren's Life and Casualty after the discovery that $12 million in death benefits has been paid to an imposter and that the insurance agent who authorized the payment has disappeared. The mystery expands when the missing agent, a lost love of Walker's, is found murdered. From the cinematic opening scene, which follows the doomed woman to an undisclosed appointment, through the threading of Stillman and Walker through a labyrinth of figures and deals, Percy never lets up on the suspense. Masterful. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ellen leaned forward over the sink and took a last, critical look at her makeup in the bathroom mirror. She could see that the eyes were good. The way to look trustworthy was to look trusting, and her eyes seemed big and blue and wide-open. The color on the cheeks was good, too: she could tell it was clear, smooth, and natural, even though the mirror was pocked with black spots, and the light in here was harsh and yellow. But she intended to be there early enough to slip into the ladies' room, do a recheck, and make any necessary revisions before she was seen. She had been training herself not to take anything for granted since she was nine years old, and she was twenty-four now. Not to anticipate problems was to invite them.

She went back into her kitchen, picked her purse off the table, and slung it over her shoulder, then opened her thin leather briefcase to be sure she had everything. She always carried a small kit consisting of the brochures and forms necessary to commit a customer to one of the common policies: term life, whole life, health, home owner's, auto. Before she had left the office last night, she had added some of the more exotic ones to cover art, jewelry, planes, and boats. The application forms she carried always had her name typed in as agent, with her telephone extension and office and e-mail addresses in the other boxes, and her signature already in the space at the bottom. She never left the home office in doubt about who should get the commission.

Clipped to the inside of her briefcase she carried a slim gold pen that felt good in a customer's hand when he signed his name, and she kept an identical one, never used, out of sight below it so there could never be a moment when she was ready to close on a customer and couldn't. Taking a few simple, habitual precautions was usually enough to keep her from lying in bed at night worrying about lost opportunity, failure, and humiliation.

She reached into the other side of the divider in her briefcase, pulled out the claim forms she had prepared, and examined them. She was not proofreading the entries. She knew there were no mistakes. She had been up late, studying the files, filling in the blank spaces on the forms with a typewriter, so there would be no real paperwork left to do. This morning
she used the forms to test her memory of family names, addresses, dates.

She had no illusion that she was engaged in anything but an act of dissimulation. It was conscious, studied, and practiced, and anything less than a flawless performance would be a disaster. When she had all the personal details by heart it made her listener feel as though she cared about him. Having them wrong was to be caught out as a hypocrite and a fraud. If she convinced her listener that she cared — really had his interests at heart — then she was not halfway there, she was all the way.

Ellen made sure the coffee was unplugged and the lights were all off before she went out the door and locked it. As she turned, she heard a sudden noise over her shoulder and jumped. She stared in the direction of the sound, and decided it was nothing — just an orange falling from the tree in the corner of the yard. But it was still an hour before the sun would
be up, and even Pasadena could be a bit creepy in the darkness and silence.

She knew that if she screamed, she couldn't expect the other four girls who lived in the small apartments in this building to come to her rescue, but they would at least wake up and look out their windows to see what was
going on. If somebody grabbed her, she must not rely on her neighbors altruism. She must yell "Fire!"while she fought. She had read that this was what the experts advised, and so that was what she would try to do.

She wished she weren't feeling so jumpy. For the past two days she had been increasingly anxious, and the discomfort seemed to have gotten more vivid this morning. She had to remind herself that this was not something to be afraid of. It was an opportunity. If she used it well, it was a step toward getting everything she wanted.

She looked down the empty driveway at the street, then stepped toward the open garage where her car was parked, and took the time to check and be sure the car was locked. This compulsion to check everything made her a bit ashamed. She had not just been worrying about accomplishing what she had to do this morning. She had been having feelings that something was wrong. At times, she had detected the sensation that someone was watching her. Yesterday she had been walking down the street in Old Town, looking in shops not far from the office, and had sensed eyes on her. She had
stopped abruptly, pretending to look in a store window, and studied the sidewalk behind her in the reflection. She had waited until the other pedestrians had walked past her and had determined that they all appeared harmless before she moved on. She had told herself that she had just sensed some man staring at her. They did that, after all, and they meant
no harm. But she had not convinced herself: when they meant no harm, they were always easy to catch. They wanted to be caught.

She made her way down the driveway to wait for the cab to arrive. She glanced at her watch. It was still not even five a.m. There was no reason to feel impatient. The cab wasn't late; she was early. Probably she had been spending too much time alone lately.

She defended herself from her own accusation. The isolation had not really been her fault. Even after a year here, the people in the Pasadena office were still the only people she knew in southern California. She had seen at the beginning that none of them were likely to become close friends. At best they were allies, and at worst they were obstacles, fixed objects she
would have to work her way around. To get what she needed, she would have to deceive them about her feelings, keep certain information she picked up away from them, and use it to her advantage, all the while smiling and evading. She had done that. No wonder she was nervous.

She stared up the dark street, searching for headlights. In the heavy stillness of the residential neighborhood, she could hear distant engine sounds at the far end of the next block, where the street met Colorado Boulevard. Every few seconds, a car or truck would swish past the intersection, but none of them made the turn. The faintness of the sounds reminded her of how alone she was.

She had read an article in a women's magazine that said if a person had a feeling — an uneasy intuition that something was wrong, that a man she was with made her uncomfortable, that a place made her feel vulnerable — she should not ignore it. Her eyes had probably seen something, her ears had probably heard something, but her mind was trying to brush it aside and explain it away because denial was easier than facing the danger.

Ellen caught herself forming a clear mental image of John Walker. She could see his dark brown hair, his calm, wise eyes. She was sure it was the uneasiness that had brought him back. When she had been with him, she had always felt safe. It was not just because he was tall and broad-shouldered and physically fit. He had a quiet, thoughtful manner, and he was reliable. She felt a sharp pang that surprised her. She could have been with him — maybe not married him, because that would have ruined everything, but at least had him nearby. Driving over here before dawn to pick her up was exactly the sort of thing he would have done, and she would have known — positively known — that he would be here on time. She made an effort to push him out of her mind and obscure his image in her memory. The worst thing for a person to worry about was some decision she had made in the past.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679453059
• ISBN 13: 9780679453055
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400