Occasional Hell - Softcover

Silvis, Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345387279 ISBN 13: 9780345387271

Publisher: Fawcett, 1995

Synopsis

"RIVETING...COMPELLING...Silvis engages the reader from first word to last.
--Los Angeles Reader
P.I. Ernest DeWalt snooped on two-timing spouses for twenty years until a hail of bullets knocked him out of the game. Whoever heard of a sleuth with bum kidneys? Denied such staples of gumshoe life as booze, salty food, and sex, Ernest DeWalt winds up teaching literature courses in a nearly comatose college town.
It's a life that the reclusive DeWalt has nevertheless snuggled into with reasonable comfort. Too bad fate won't just let this disillusioned sleeping dog lie. Too bad a fellow faculty member--in the throes of a fling with the sexy waitress wife of a small-time rock singer--ends up with a musket ball in his brain. And too bad it's so hard to say no to the dead man's wife, when she asks DeWalt to crawl out of his shell and bring his private-eye prowess into play just one more time....
"AN EXTRAORDINARILY LITERATE MYSTERY.
--The Washington Times
"An interesting puzzle packaged in superior prose, AN OCCASIONAL HELL is an absorbing and reflective read.
--The Mystery Review

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

An unusually morbid detective protagonist, a verbosely stylized opening and occasional passages of vibrant prose produce mixed results in this first mystery from Silvis ( The Luckiest Man in the World ), a Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner. Before his kidneys and liver were riddled by bullets, Ernest DeWalt was a Chicago PI and successful novelist. Now a college professor in rural Pennsylvania, he survives with a soured attitude, an ever-present catheter hidden beneath his shirt, and a regimen that allows him no booze and no sex. DeWalt's reveries on love and lost promise are interrupted when a philandering colleague, Alex Catanzaro, is killed in a farmland trysting place and his widow asks the former PI for help. For years Catanzaro had had an affair with a local waitress, now missing, with no resistance from her husband, a drug-addicted rock musician, also missing. After a convoluted and mannered beginning, Silvis settles into the action, lacing his narrative with astute observations and hard truths. Though flawed, this work succeeds in leaving dark images to linger in the reader's mind.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fawcett
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0345387279
• ISBN 13: 9780345387271
• Binding: Paperback