World of Hurt

With World of Hurt, his first new novel in six years, Rosen returns with a tour-de-force tale of real estate deception and psychological abuse. When real estate agent Larry Peplow is found murdered in a desolate field, the search for his killer takes retired baseball player-turned-private investigator Harvey Blissberg from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to affluent Chicago suburbs to the coast of Maine...and to some places not found in any atlas.
Lured into the investigation by his older brother, Norm, Harvey leaves Boston, his troubled relationship with live-in love Mickey Slavin, and his new therapist to follow the trail of damaged souls that ends at Larry Peplow's corpse. No one seems to know much about Peplow - just that he'd last lived in Maine, that he was part of Norm's regular pickup basketball game, and that just before his head was blown off he'd told a little real estate lie...
In World of Hurt, everyone lies - even Harvey falls into the habit - but the biggest fabrication of all turns out to be Larry Peplow himself. Discovering his secrets takes time, for his murder conceals another, much slower death that is all but forgotten. The pieces that Harvey slowly puts together are painful, and the final puzzle is a picture of madness, sadness, and murderous rage.

Edgar winner Rosen (for Strike Three, You're Dead) has written three well-received mysteries starring laconic ex-ballplayer Harvey Blissberg of Boston. The fourth is an asymmetrical novel that moves uneasily between Portland, Maine, and a handful of fictional Chicago suburbs as Harvey, investigating the last days of a dead realtor, finds out a lot about dishonesty, betrayal and revenge. Larry Peplow, with few friends in Garden Hills, Ill., and a curiously empty life, left little to explain a bullet to the head. His past reveals more. He was once a psychotherapist in Maine, with a woman patient who committed suicide. Harvey, moving just ahead of the local cops, cheats on his longtime lover with a randy Garden Hills housewife. While most of the segments set in Chicago sections seem lifeless, those set in the East unleash a deluge of pertinent information. Rosen writes crisp dialogue but he overburdens his characters with flaws, and Harvey's baseball life is an ace too rarely played. The verve shown in Rosen's earlier work is missing here. Readers will hope it's just a slump. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It's a long way from Cambridge, where retired baseball player Harvey Blissberg (Saturday Night Dead, 1988, etc.) hangs his hat, to suburban Chicago, where his brother Norm's basketball buddy has been killed. But as Harvey finds out when he agrees to look into Larry Peplow's shooting in back of Rimwood Estates, a new development he was pushing, it's even further from Larry's plausible fa‡ade to the past he's been covering up. The smooth- talking realtor told one friend he used to be a therapist, another that he once taught English literature; he described his mother alternately as living, emotionally distant, dead. Harvey learns without much trouble--leads tend to fall into his lap in the novel's deceptively simple first half--that Larry had suppressed a bona fide offer on a property he was handling in order to wangle a bigger commission. But is it true that he had seduced his party- planning client Marilyn Barger (who's ready to jump Harvey's bones in the front seat of her car), or that, as Marilyn says, Rimwood Estates (``We Take the Worry Out of Living'') is sitting atop a toxic-waste site? It isn't until a cryptic notation in Larry's phone book sends Harvey down east to Portland, where Larry did indeed turn his back on a psychiatric practice, that he realizes just how duplicitous the dead man was and how much it'll cost, even now, to lay him to rest. Familiar traumas, every one, but Rosen's intensity--especially when Harvey begins to notice how completely he's stepped into the despicable victim's shoes--makes them bleed afresh. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Harvey Blissberg, ex-major league outfielder turned private eye, is summoned to Chicago by his brother, Norm, to look into the murder of real-estate agent Larry Peplow. Norm once played basketball with Larry and feels an obligation to this pleasant, apparently family-less man whose death the police appear to have chalked up to street crime. Harvey takes the case, if only to assuage his brother's sense of obligation. What he learns isn't pretty: Peplow worked primarily with a development that may be located on a toxic-waste site; he was something of a lecher; and he worked as a psychologist until one of his female patients, with whom he had an affair, committed suicide. Harvey, involved in a fling of his own, finds himself wondering whether he is as dishonest as Peplow. This fourth Blissberg novel is another strong entry in a steadily improving series. The ex-ballplayer gambit fades in significance as Harvey's character evolves. In the tradition of Bill Pronzini, Lawrence Block, and Joseph Hansen, Rosen is creating a fictional biography one book at a time. Wes Lukowsky