BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO
by Ed Gorman
As the nation holds its breath during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Iowa lawyer Sam McCain is immersed in an unusually tawdry small-town murder and the unending complications of his own love life.
Ross Murdoch, the bosom friend of Sam’s boss, Judge Esme Anne Whitney, is in a pickle. There’s a dead woman in his bomb shelter—a woman he had an unsavory history with. As did his other bosom friends, prissy broker Peter Carlson, grumpy TV-station magnate Gavin Wheeler, and mean attorney Mike Hardin, who together with Murdoch had set Chicago hostess Karen Hastings up in a Black River Falls love nest as their shared companion of the evening. Even Sam (Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, 2003, etc.), whom Murdoch wants to keep clean so that he can run for governor, is in a pickle, since he’d just taken $250 to deliver a package to the dead woman from her brother and accomplice in extortion. And Sam’s sex life is suffering from circuit overload: his longtime lust object, the beautiful Pamela Forrest, has come running to him from the husband she wants to divorce—the troubled couple end up outlandishly bivouacking in Sam’s bedroom—and so has Mary Travers, who gave up on Sam to marry the pharmacist who’s now giving up on her.
The finest hour yet for an idealistic. In a sixth outing, he’s at his most unguarded and appealing.