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Title: A Well-Known Secret
Subtitle: Terry Orr, Book 2
Author: Jim Fusilli
Narrator: Peter Ganim
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-10-12
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Modern Detective
Publisher's Summary:
Terry Orr is a man haunted by the murder of his wife and son - and by the tragedy that darkened the streets in lower Manhattan. Now more than ever, his life has purpose. He has to raise his 14-year-old daughter alone - and he has to find the killer who shattered his world.
Members Reviews:
HEALING IS HARD
Whenever a new novelist writes a stirring and great book the first time his fiction is published, you sometimes wonder if that initial effort will ever be matched. James Jones, although writing good work like The Thin Red Line, never came close to From Here To Eternity. A little more than a decade ago, Yale Law Professor and public intellectual Stephen L. Carter received almost unanimous raves for his deep, thoughtful mystery, The Emperor of Ocean Park, but his efforts since then have been mixed.
When I read Closing Time by Jim Fusilli, I thought it was the best first novel since, well, Stephen L. Carter's. Featuring Terry Orr, who gives up his writing career to become an amateur investigator in order to find the killer who murdered his wife and baby son, it is a remarkable novel that even those who don't usually read mysteries ought to devour. By the time I read it, a dozen years after it was published, I knew Fusilli had penned several other novels. Surely however, he had not reached the same literary mountaintop again.
I was wrong, for in the second book about Terry Orr, he has matched his first. In A Well-Kept Secret, Orr is now a licensed private investigator, but still pained terribly by his personal losses and as yet unable to find the classical pianist who became a swirling sociopath and ruined Orr's happiness. His housekeeper asks him to find th4e daughter of an acquaintance, just released from jail after a thirty year sentence for the brutal murder of a diamond dealer. Orr finds not the woman, Sonia Salgado, but her corpse, in her small apartment. The first thing that strikes his interest are books and plays about Cuban theatre in the death room.
Orr, working on his own, investigates,but always under some kind of implied threat, including that of a detective, Tommy Mango, who plays by his own rules. Orr learns than Sonia had three friends in high school, her boyfriend Sixto, another student named Bascomb, and Hassan, who loved the theatre as did she. Resolutely, he begins to believe that Sonia was not guilty of the murder that put her behind bars. And if I can disclose one clue here without wrecking the story for future readers, it all has to do with a simple traffic ticket.
The lead character in this book is obviously highly intelligent, but shows no trace of snobbishness. His two best friends, although not sidekicks in the crime solving, are a socially awkward, unusually wired, pot smoking rock 'n' roll critic, and a large hulk of a bar owner who cooks wonderful meals on a hot plate in his office. Important to his existence is his daughter Bella, now 14, self-confident, even a little bratty, but winning. She even excoriates her father for his treatment of a pretty attorney so obviously interested in him, and is frustrated that her father is not healing as fast as she would like. And as to that attorney, in a small scene in which Orr tries to explain that he is too tortured by memories to get involved, her response is surprising and utterly heartwarming.
That is one thing about Fusilli.
