The Good and the Dead

He has written many true crime stories for various magazines and has had one book published, but he never expected to be more than an observer on a homicide case. He revises his assessment when his brother calls to tell him that the police think he killed his wife. Ben Newman knows his sibling is not a murderer.At his sister-in-law's funeral, Ellen Strickland informs Ben that an old classmate of theirs, Gerry Havers committed suicide three weeks ago. The next day, Ellen is found dead from a supposed car accident. Another classmate soon dies too. Ben concludes that someone has targeted his elementary school class and he feels he must discover who is the culpriit before anyone else dies.Seymour Shubin is a gifted storyteller who creates a chilling psychological suspense tale. The tension builds in this work to a degree that readers will feel they ran a three-minute mile by the time they reach the finish line. Mr. Shubin turns his villain into a pitiable person rather than a hard-core evil soul, which leads to conflicting emotions on the part of the audience. No one will complete the novel feeling dissatisfied except with the fact that there is no more pages to read.Harriet Klausner

Seymour Shubin, author of this engaging novel, has been an Edgar finalist. It's understandable when you read this, his eleventh novel. Here is a story that will tap the nostalgia factor in every reader. Here is a story that crawls inside our hearts, that has us nodding in vivid recall as we walk with writer Ben Newman back down the streets of time, into his childhood. Here is a story that from the first chapter catches at our fading memories. And something more. Because the mind works in strange ways, many times suppressing or erasing the bad times, the things we did as a child of which we are ashamed, or a little mbarrassed about. If we pick at those memories, sometimes what we discover, is that the reality of those events of years ago are not exactly what we remember.And sometimes, sometimes, participants in those old memories come back to haunt us. From the very beginning, Shubin's prose takes us first by the hand, and then by the throat. Ben Newman returns to his old neighborhood when his brother's wife dies in a tragic accident. As the spiral tightens and mistakes and missteps by Ben's brother bring police focus to the possibility that the woman was murdered, Ben begins a voyage of discovery. It's a voyage with increasing tension and suspense because Ben begins to discover that perhaps the woman was murdered, not by her husband, Ben's brother, but by someone from Ben's elementary school past. And it appears a killer is stalking Ben's former classmates in an effort to repay an old debt.The book is properly called psychological suspense, and it is a thriller. Anyone who reads this engaging novel will come away with a different understanding and perhaps an altered perspective on their golden youthful days in elementary school.