Moss bearded the paddles, which dripped as they rose. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. My Review: Small-town California has a lot of atmosphere, according to Hansen I don't remember it that way, but I was young and miserable, so I'll go with the man who found there something that led to this description of an old mill made into a theater:The waterwheel was twice a man’s height, wider than a man’s two stretched arms. Along the way, Dave soon comes to agree with April. April believed he'd been murdered.Dave Brandstetter's investigation takes him through the rare-book world, to backstage at a community theatre, to the home of a world-famous television performer. The police don't seem to care.'She was April Stannard. 'I'm looking for Peter Oats,' he said.'He's not here. I'm a claims investigator for the Medallion Life Insurance Company.' He handed her a card. Rating: 4* of five The Book Description: 'My name is David Brandstetter.

His new lover, Doug, is also grieving, and the two men must come to a reckoning of whether their love is an ersatz stand-in for their lost partners or something more. Still mourning the death of his partner, Rod, Dave is navigating his own twilight world of grief. As his investigation reveals more of John Oats’s sad story Brandstetter learns that the motives for murder are many.īut Brandstetter has his own problems to deal with.

The night Oats died there was a dangerous storm along the coast, and Brandstetter finds it hard to believe that the bookseller, a lifelong swimmer, would have gone out. Insurance companies don’t much care for verdicts like that and therefore Medallion Insurance, the policy holder for Oats’s substantial life insurance policy, sends out its best investigator, Dave Brandstetter, to poke holes in the story. When his body is found one morning smashed against the rocks at the treacherous point near the house, the authorities rule it “Death by Misadventure.” An avid swimmer, John Oats had taken to night swimming to hide his injuries from daytime beachgoers. Since a burning accident that left him painfully disfigured, John Oats, a well-liked collectible book dealer, has been self-isolating at his beach house in Arena Blanca, California. CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTERĭeath claims investigator Dave Brandstetter enters a world thespians and booksellers as he uncovers the true story behind the death of a rare book dealer in this noir-spun masterpiece of California crime fiction.

Death claims joseph hansen