The WISDOM OF SERPENTS (A Nate Rosen Mystery) - Hardcover

Ronald Levitsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684194112 ISBN 13: 9780684194110

Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992

Synopsis

Civil rights lawyer Nate Rosen travels to Tennessee to defend the minister of a local church who is charged with murdering a young believer in a venomous ritual

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Civil rights lawyer Nate Rosen, introduced in Love That Kills, travels from Washington, D.C., to rural Tennessee in this unconvincing mystery about a fundamentalist church whose members handle rattlesnakes and drink strychninesp ok . Rosen's law school friend, Jesse Compton, who now teaches courses on popular culture at a college near Nashville, was observing a church service when a member was bitten by a rattler. After charges are brought against the minister, Gideon McCrae, Compton wonders whether the rights of the church group, which includes McCrae's beautiful daughter Bathsheba and Claire Hobbes, young wife of a wealthy local businessman, are being violated. Claire's husband, who hated the church's influence on his wife, is poisoned and dies, another church member is shot, and then a blackmailing PI is mortally stabbed. As the investigation uncovers Claire's unsavory past and a conflict between Hobbes and his brother, Rosen is personally troubled as McCrae's unshakeable faith revives memories of his strict upbringing in the Jewish religion, which he has abandoned. Red herrings are obviously, if plausibly, placed, and Levitsky offers a fine surprise in his resolution, but until then the story is fatally mired in forced dialogue and shallow characterization.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Civil-rights lawyer Nate Rosen (The Love That Kills, 1991), called by his old friend Jesse Compton to Earlyville, Tennessee, to defend snake-handling Rev. Gideon McCrae after a rattler bites Holiness Church congregant Lemuel Banks, takes an unlikely detour when Lem recovers from the bite (and Nate finds a foolproof defense for McCrae)--but furniture king Ben Hobbes, disapproving old husband of childlike congregant Claire Hobbes, gets poisoned with the strychnine the Holiness Church had been sipping. As Jesse finds himself falling heavily for McCrae's daughter Bathsheba and her father's Bible- thumping brand of religion, Nate tangles with the Claire-hating Hobbes family, the police, a pugnacious private eye, and a warmhearted Jewish palm-reader before two more homicides bring him up against answers he'd rather not know. Don't be fooled by sensitive Nate's low profile: Levitsky is already turning out some of the strongest detective fiction since Ross Macdonald. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0684194112
• ISBN 13: 9780684194110
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256