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DIE DREAMING by Terence Faherty

DIE DREAMING

by Terence Faherty

Pub Date: July 19th, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11045-6
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

When he puckishly takes out an ad for his nonexistent detective agency (``unanswerable questions discreetly answered'') in the 10th anniversary yearbook for Our Lady of Sorrows High School, Owen Keane is called on his bluff in record time. As soon as he turns up at the reunion, actress Maureen McCary wants him to give her advice about how to handle a blackmailer. Learning from an old flame that Maureen's case is nothing but another bluff cooked up to entertain the Sorrowers, a clique of the Class of 1968's best and brightest, Owen (The Lost Keats, 1993, etc.) sets out to show Maureen up by unearthing the truth about aging flower child David Radici's cryptic reference to ``Princeton''—which had the attending Sorrowers on the ropes. Shrugging off two tidy, inconsistent explanations offered by football captain Bill Pearson and valedictorian Lucy Criscollo, Owen traces the Princeton secret to Ricky Gerow, an aspiring Sorrower whose life has been ruined by drug experiences he insists he never had. Before he's left town for home, Owen will be satisfied that he's solved the mystery—but it won't be until the class's 20th reunion, after Ricky is dead, that the real and terrible depths of the mystery will finally become clear. As usual, Owen's original voice and his intriguing take on detective work—the sleuth as clown as spiritual therapist—make his latest appearance memorably offbeat and well worth seeking out.