Parents! Talk to your children about sex! Lest they end up a WITNESS TO MYSELF!
Alan should know. In Seymour Shubin’s newest crime novel, he was a good but overprotected kid, being an only child. Girls were an utter mystery to him when he hit puberty 15 years ago. On vacation in Cape Cod with his folks, his sexual curiosity gets the best (or worst) of him when a chance encounter in the woods leaves a 12-year-old girl dead. Or at least he thinks so. Never caught nor questioned, Alan is haunted by the memory of that day half his life ago.
Now a lawyer and falling in love for the first time with a sympathetic nurse (they meet cute as he recovers from gall bladder surgery), he can’t rest until he finds out what exactly happened to the girl. Did she die at all? And if so, was he really to blame? Despite the nagging guilt he already harbors, Alan will wish he’d left well enough alone.
His paranoia slowly but markedly escalates, and I felt it as well every step of the way. WITNESS TO MYSELF is literally a pulse-pounder. Narrated by Alan’s loving cousin Colin – a crime writer – the novel has a shuddering, you-are-there intimacy made all the more uncomfortably close as it deals with all-too-familiar pangs of adolesence. In that aspect, it’s a different shade of noir for Hard Case Crime; their books are always harrowing, gritty and even violent … but poignant? Shubin’s sobering tale is definitely that, full of very real emotions, while also earning high marks for highest-order suspense. This demands to be read in a single sitting, and earns it.
Despite his huge childhood mistake, I really felt for Alan, who is otherwise a good person. Certainly this was Shubin’s intention, and he does a masterful job of making you think the story will go this way, or this character will do that. Instead, he arrives at a heartbreaking end that’s a sucker-punch to the groin, and I mean that as a compliment. Few writers can make you feel that kind of pain. For that, I call WITNESS TO MYSELF as the finest book Hard Case has issued so far, new or old. –Rod Lott
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I’m a fan of Hard Case Crime, and this book sounds like a wonderful addition to their inventory. Violent, suspenseful and poignant? Definitely sounds like it’s worth a read.