Death in Good Company: A Mystery

by Gretchen Sprague

Book Overview

Retirement and widowhood leave mainstream attorney Martha Patterson at loose ends, so she signs on as a volunteer lawyer with a Brooklyn poverty-law office. Barely into her first week, she stumbles upon the body of a murdered client in a deteriorating apartment building.Her sense of noblesse oblige combines with an unquenchable curiosity to involve her in the investigation, leading her to strange people in stranger surroundings.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312168136
• ISBN13: 9780312168131
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Mystery with a Likeable New Sleuth

Martha Patterson spent nearly fifty years as a trusts and estates attorney, but found retirement stifling. So she's taken an old acquaintance up on his offer to put her to work as a pro bono attorney at his poverty law firm, West Brooklyn Legal Services.Wilma Oberfell isn't even her client, but Martha feels a fleeting connection with the woman. Wilma barely has time to introduce herself and say "I don't know whom I can trust" before losing the opportunity to unburden herself to Martha. When she discovers Wilma's strangled body, she feels a responsibility to find out what it was Wilma had wanted to tell her, and who it was who went to such lengths to silence Wilma. Martha goes from not knowing what to do with herself (she had not gotten a handle on retirement) to having lots to do. She has a caseload, including a spirited client named Tessie Doone (a great character). Her co-workers include a charming actor-turned-attorney and his ex-significant-other, an attorney who now hates him, a pixieish paralegal, a shady paralegal, and a couple of dozen others, most of whose names Martha can't recall.I liked this book very much. There's a lot going on, but things never get convoluted, just nicely complex. The author worked for eleven years as a legal services attorney, and expertly weaves lessons about poverty law into the story. It never feels like the story stops for a lecture, but in the process of telling an intriguing story, Sprague gives an interesting crash-course on poverty law. Martha is a very likeable character. She's extremely sharp, and her motivation for getting involved in Wilma's case is believable. She felt a connection with the woman, she feels it was her fault Wilma didn't get to tell her what was going on, and she does not want to go home to read Pride and Prejudice again. The other characters are also well-drawn, and the plotting is very good. One quibble: Martha says "Just so" too often! Still, an excellent read.

Exciting detective-novel with a social dimension.

Gretchen Sprague is a brilliant newcomer to crime-fiction. Emma Lathen meets Walter Mosley when privileged lawyers work for justice for the multi-ethnic underclass, but which side of the social divide are the criminals on? As the gripping climax develops, clues previously scattered throughout the tale are unobtrusively pulled together, making this a beautifully constructed classic novel of detection. Lawyer Martha Patterson makes a splendid detective, cool, sharp, with an dry sense of humour and a social conscience. The most enjoyable detective novel I have read in many years. John Frankis.