Memory Book - Softcover

Engel, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143016660 ISBN 13: 9780143016663

Publisher: Penguin Canada, 2006

Synopsis

In this eleventh Benny Cooperman mystery, the beloved private investigator becomes his own client.

Benny is recovering in a Toronto hospital from a serious blow to the head. He has a condition called alexia sine agraphia; in layman's terms, it means he can still write but cannot read. And his memory has been affected too: although he can still quote lines from his high-school production of Twelfth Night, he finds himself brushing his teeth with his shaving cream. Even his girlfriend's name—Anna Abraham—continues to elude him.

When Benny learns that he was found unconscious beside a dead woman in a Dumpster, he figures he must have been close to solving a case. With Anna working as field agent and two Toronto cops reluctantly sharing their discoveries, Benny tries to piece together the events that led to a murder—and his own injuries.

About this title

About the Author:

Howard Engel was a producer for the CBC for many years. THE COOPERMAN VARIATIONS was his tenth Benny Cooperman novel. He has also written MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE and MR. DOYLE AND DR. BELL, a Sherlockian delight. A founding member of the Crime Writers of Canada, Howard Engel won the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and the 1984 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. He has received the prestigious Matt Cohen Award in celebration of a Writing Life. He was recently the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor in Canadian Culture at the University of Toronto. After suffering a stroke, Engel was diagnosed with alexia sine agraphia, or "pure word blindness," which is an interruption of signals between the parts of the brain that receive visual data from the eye and those that decipher language.

From Publishers Weekly:

Engel's 11th Benny Cooperman mystery (The Cooperman Variations, etc.) is notable because it's the Canadian author's first novel since 2000, when a small stroke left him with a rare disorder that rendered him able to write but unable to read. His PI hero suffers from the same ailment as he wakes from a recurring dream about a train wreck to find himself in a Toronto hospital. It turns out Benny has been in a coma for eight weeks after being found in a Dumpster near the university with a near-fatal blow to the head—next to the body of a young female professor, dead of a similar head trauma. Using a small notebook in which he jots things as they occur to him—a memory book—Benny and girlfriend Anna Abraham reconstruct his most recent case. An anonymously sent basket of roses triggers the name Rose or Rosie, while the sudden disappearance of a student and a prominent faculty member suggests conspiracy. Engel is better on the mechanics of Benny's disorder, and on his laborious recovery process, than he is at creating sleuthful suspense. Benny's vividness, and that of a variety of incidental characters, carries the book. (Jan.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Canada
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0143016660
• ISBN 13: 9780143016663
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 256