The Obituary Writer
Something just didn’t seem right when Wallace McRae got word in the middle of the night that an eminent chemist he’d just interviewed had taken his own life by slashing his wrists with a straight razor in his bath tub.
McRae’s job, which he’d been forced to take after getting fired for drinking, was to prepare obituaries of famous, older people so his new employer, dead.com, could respond to a person’s death with a quick story, ideally full of dirt and rumors that would attract online viewers – and advertising. His odious boss’s motto on how far to go in writing an obituary was: “You can’t libel a dead man.”
Taking the job was a Faustian bargain. McRae, known to all as just Mack, had traded his skills as a prize-winning investigative reporter for health insurance that covered the mounting medical bills of his dying wife.
Mack had often interviewed the dead chemist, who was obsessed with winning the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on obesity and dementia. As he told his boss the night he got the news of the man’s death: “He didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body.”
Intrigued, his boss ordered him to dig into the matter, mostly because he saw the possibility of millions of eyeballs coming to his obituary website to read a juicy, viral story. Mack saw something different: a chance to redeem himself with a legitimate scoop that showed the man’s official suicide had been something more sinister.
As he would find, others with a huge financial interest in the true story were willing to resort to threats and even murder to muzzle Mack before he could print the truth
"Patrick Oster delivers a mystery novel that is simply impossible to put down. A thoroughly enjoyable murder mystery with a main character who is fun to cheer for."
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