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Book Review: Hardscrabble Road

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  • Book Review: Hardscrabble Road

    BOOK REVIEW: HARDSCRABBLE ROAD

    Kirkus Reviews
    April 1, 2006

    After his road trip to New England (The Headmaster's Wife, 2005),
    Gregor Demarkian, the Armenian-American Poirot, finds his biggest
    case waiting back home in Philadelphia.

    Every time right-wing radio agitator Drew Harrigan opens his
    mouth on the air, he gives five new strangers motives for killing
    him. Now he's sunk to a new low. Arrested by two Philly cops who've
    found his car full of prescription drugs with nary a prescription,
    he's fingered homeless handyman Sherman Markey as his supplier and
    shielded a big asset by deeding a local real-estate parcel to Holy
    Innocents Benedictine monastery, where his sister, Mother Constanzia
    of the Assumption of Mary, presides. When celebrity-loving Judge
    Bruce Williamson sends Drew to rehab, dull-witted, alcoholic Markey
    becomes the center of a media firestorm and takes Drew's place as
    the city's most likely murder victim. It would make sense if Markey
    were killed by Drew's lawyers, who'd prefer to crucify him without
    dealing with his sworn testimony; or by Markey's own legal team at
    the Justice Project, who'd find him easier to transform into a martyr
    in his absence; or by UPenn professors Jig Tyler or Alison Standish,
    for reasons of their own. But things develop along quite different
    lines for Gregor, who's pulled into a case that's complex mainly
    because the people involved are so complicated.

    Haddam outdoes herself with a broad canvas that recalls John Gregory
    Dunne's Nothing Lost and the best of P.D. James.

    Publication Date: 5/15/2006 0:00:00 Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
    Stage: Adult Star: 1 ISBN: 0-312-35373-1 price: $24.95 Author:
    Haddam, Jane
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