An ancient brotherhood meets annually in the back room of a swank Manhattan restaurant, a fraternity created in secret to celebrate life by celebrating its dead. But the past three decades have not been kind to the Club of 31. Matthew Scudder—ex-cop and ex-boozer—has known death in all its guises, which is why he has been asked to investigate a baffling thirty-year run of suicides and suspiciously random accidents that has thinned the ranks of this very select group of gentlemen.
But Scudder has mortality problems of his own, for his is a city that feeds mercilessly on the unsuspecting—even the powerful and those who serve them are easy prey. There are too many secrets here, too many places for a maddeningly patient serial killer to hide … and wait … and strike.
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“Block takes this absolutely wonderful premise and makes the
most of it. Like all the best hard-boiled writers in the post-Chandler era,
Block knows that character and ambience are the heart and soul of crime
fiction, but unlike so many of his brethren, he also maintains a healthy respect
for plot. When you read a lot of mysteries, you come to feel a numbing
inevitability about literary murder: there are only so many motives and so many
ways to kill somebody, and we’ve seen them all. Hence the pleasure of
encountering a new Block novel and realizing again the joys of a fresh premise.”
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Booklist (starred review)