A skeleton of the driver behind the wheel of a Mercedes found under an iced over pond in the Berkshire becomes a warmed up cold case for Sally McDevitt, Chief of Detectives of the Massachusetts State Police who previously worked for the NYPD and is an old friend of Ross. The identity of the body appears to be the former CEO of a multinational conglomerate in New York City so Sal and Ross team up together on this case, which involves international finance, romance and murder.

Peretz has grown as a mystery writer with this novel. The 324 page soft covered edition which I read has 96 chapters plus a preface and an epilogue. The average chapter is about three and a half pages and some of them are only a single page. This literary device of many brief chapters allows the reader to move back and forth to locations on the east coast and Europe and be privy to various events many of which are taking place simultaneously. The author combines this approach with a technique of frequently sharing the character’s inner thoughts as well as the words he or she utters. This adds up to a fast moving story line but with a  rich development of the characters.

The author’s knowledge of psychiatry is brought into play in several ways in this book. Not only were there complicated characters who were anxious and depressed at various times but some of them spoke of their dreams. There was also an important person who had been a high functioning secretary or a key assistant in today’s parlance. Due to a series of events she became a bag lady living in the streets and appeared to have a speech pattern indicating a thought disorder of a major psychiatric disorder. She then began to show a flight into mental health all related to the plot of the story. Another important character in the story had a consultation with a psychiatrist. This encounter included issues of countertransference and even hypnosis. Needless to say there were also some complicated interpersonal issues.

The author also appeared to have good insight into how smart detectives think and work. He was able to weave their approach to the case at hand with their personal lives. Similarly suspects and the other people that we met in the story came to life as real people. This was topped off this with good pacing which turned into a page turner at the end of the book complete with suspense and unpredictability. He has put himself into the major leagues of detective novels . If Dr. Peretz decides to spend more time away from behind the couch in order to turn out a few more of these novels, I think he should find a ready and grateful audience.

Take Five with the Author

The following are five questions which the author was kind enough to answer for me and I would like to share with you.

Q-  How did you decide to write detective novels?

In the early 1990’s, I wrote a pilot for a television series, “Dan Bruce”, based on the exploits of    colleague and dear friend, the late Bruce Danto, M.D.  (Fullerton, CA). Bruce was a forensic psychiatrist.  The teleplay was optioned twice, but not produced.  When I read about the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany and Austria, as someone who had come of age during World War II, with my mother’s family perishing in the Holocaust, I said to my wife, “I’ve got to do something about this.” I wrote a screenplay, “A Legacy of Vienna” which was not sold. My wife suggested that I write it as a novel, and it became  “The Mosel Legacy.”

Q- Do you research the subject matter of your books and if so , how do you go about doing this?

I did library research on Vienna and the rise of Nazism. After completing the   novel, we visited Vienna and I checked out the accuracy of locations. (This refers to his first novel The Mosel Legacy previously reviewed in this blog.-MB)

Q- In your second novel The Broderick Curse you appear to bring in  your psychiatric background ie dreams, visit to a psychiatrist and even hypnosis. Do you plan to do more of this in future novels?

My psychiatric background helps me to develop character and conflict.  I’m currently working on the third in the series of Ross Cortese novels titled “Revenge.” There will be a psychiatrist consultant brought in by the Major Case squad.

Q- One of the characters in The Broderick Curse is shown to have been a high functioning secretary who then becomes a bag lady with examples of thought disorders but yet this change seems to have occurred because of circumstances in her life rather than her being schizophrenic. Would you care to comment if you meant for this character to have a specific major psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia?

I did not mean for Helen to suffer from schizophrenia; if anything,  depression and paranoid fantasies.

Q- Will you be devoting more time to producing more novels in a shorter period of time and will they continue to follow your NYC detective?

I practice full-time (Monday-Thursday)–  and write on the weekends, aiming for about fifteen hours between Friday and Sunday ( see also question #3)

The Mosel Legacy, novel by David Peretz,  Disc-Us Books,  p 199

David Peretz, M.D.

When David Peretz sent me an email and asked  if I would be interested in reviewing his two novels, I was thrilled with the prospect of doing so. I don’t believe that I have met him previously although we shared several professional interests. When I opened to the first page of the book and saw that it was set in Vienna in March 1938 , which was few months before Sigmund Freud escaped from that city with his daughter Anna. I thought for sure that this psychiatrist and psychoanalyst  author was  going to include the father of psychoanalysis  somehow in his story. For the first part of the book, I kept waiting for my fantasy to turn out to be true but actually the word Freud was only mentioned once in the book in passing and that was as in a description of Vienna, noting  the great minds that lived and worked in this once vibrant city.

Instead, Peretz presented in his first published  novel a  suspense thriller which led a modern day New York City detective to travel to Vienna on a personal quest and an odyssey in which he discovered more than he ever imagined he would find. Ross Cortese is an Italian –American recent widower who has a great relationship with his grown kids and his parents. He is need of some cash and decides to find out if some antique furniture given to him by his father  has any value. After a visit to a prominent NYC  auction house he realizes it is quite valuable . Word gets back to  Erich Hanfnagel, a wealthy  Viennese business man collector who learns that these items of furniture made by Kirmen Mosel, a famed furniture maker,  have surfaced and would complete his collection of these great pieces . He sends his beautiful daughter Willi to visit Cortese and the web of  intrigue, romance and danger  begins to spin.

The novel was published in 1999 and has some important events happening in 1938 but mostly takes place in 1990. The political setting depicted in Vienna reflects the real rise of neo Nazism taking place in Austria at that time. While not mentioned by name in the book The Freedom party led by Austrian politician Jorg Haider was appealing to a still present anti-Semitism and nostalgia for the Third Reich which was an undercurrent in the city. Peretz personalizes this ferment in the plot of his  story as his hero Ross Cortese while trying to find out the true story about the furniture and his family history encounters the Hanfnagel family and their cronies.

In the early part of the novel I was reminded of the more or less stereotyped detective stories that we all read which in this case  had a touch of everyday  dialog, some sex, violence, mystery and politics. In Peretz’s novel poverty  was described as “You didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” When things heated up we read “ She kissed him ardently one more time, then stood and began to undress” ( and much more ). Then we had “It will appear as if the Minister and the driver were in the wrong place at the wrong time…No one will feel safe with a gang of murderous immigrants roaming the streets of Vienna .”

The author seemed to get his writer’s legs as the story progressed. I focused less on the dialog which was now flowing easily  and I was carried into the plot. I could see the characters and felt the emotion of the story which could not help but have some personal meaning to me as it obviously did to Peretz. The rise of the Nazis in Europe was being retold by the storyline which dramatically demonstrated how this impacted on one Jewish family  living in Vienna in 1938 which could have been a distant relatives of so many of us. It was also very personal to  Ross Cortese who was aware of sinister events which were about to happen  in present day Vienna. Would justice triumph ? Would there be retribution and would there be forgivenenss ? It was all very well thought out . The past related to the present and the here and now related to the past. Good psychiatric thinking and a very good story.  Not bad at at all for a first novel. It was well worth reading.

I am looking forward to reading Dr. Peretz’s second novel which came out nine years later and which I will review in a few weeks.