Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

Book Overview

Every school class has a target. It was just the way the world worked . A long time ago, in the small town of Hollman, Pennsylvania, it was Liz Toliver, once too smart and too shy for her own good. Today, she's a popular author, and an esteemed CNN panelist engaged to a rock star. She has everything-including nightmares about the dreadful summer night when she was seventeen. It was a practical joke by six female classmates that ended with Liz in a...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312983069
• ISBN13: 9780312983062
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Somebody Else's Music

"Somebody Else's Music" is yet another compelling work by Jane Haddam featuring Gregor Demarkian.Successful author Liz Toliver has been the victim of scurrilous articles in the National Enquirer suggesting that she may have got away with murder. Liz has managed sucessfully to overcome her childhood unpopularity, but the horror of her experiences in her home town of Hollman is relived frequently in her dreams. Part of those recurring dreams concerns an episode of brutal bullying directed at Liz by some members of her high school class that coincided with the still unsolved murder. At the request of Liz's lover, an old acquaintance of his partner Bennis, Gregor agrees to accompany Liz to her hometown where she is to look after her aging mother. Gregor is tasked to look into the 30 year old murder and to establish the source of the National Enquirer stories.This is more than a routine mystery novel. It's as much social commentary - in particular, highlighting and skewering the more extreme manifestations of what appears to many outside observers to be a peculiar and uniquely American rite of passage called 'High School'. Ms Haddam examines the lingering implications of behaviour learnt in high school that can do untold damage to less popular individuals and, particularly in small communities, that can continue to adversely affect many people for the rest of their lives.It is a beautifully written book, with sharply drawn characters and a vivid sense of time and place. Highly recommended.

Super!

I have always thought that we don't change much after we get out of highschool, ... I thought this book was an incredibly realistic portrayal of some of the awful stuff that can go on in school, and how some people can manage to transcend these events--traumatic as they are. Speaking for myself, it was good to see the cheerleaders get their just reward in the end! ...

Jane Haddam Knows the Right Music

This is going to be one of my favorite Gregor Demarkian mysteries and I like all of them. In this book Jane Haddam does what every good writer does. She gives us a small glance into her feelings, holds up a mirror to our own memories and emotions and tells a ripping good story at the same time. Anyone who remembers high school with pain or disdain will be immediately roped into this small Pennsylvania town and its citizens who mostly are still living their Glory Days, to quote Bruce Springsteen. And like all middle aged people who hit their peaks at 16, they're pitiful and pathetic and pestilential.What's more the mystery is just as convuluted and clean as Haddam's mysteries always are. Thank you Jane Haddam.

Outstanding.

I'm not sure how long Jane Haddam can continue surpassing herself, but she's done it this time. I was convinced that True Believers was her best, but then I read Somebody Else's Music.Gregor Demarkian is pulled into a 30-year old murder by an acquaintance of Bennis'. What he discovers is that the murder, and the other events of the evening when it occurred, still color current events and everyday life for those who were involved.Liz Toliver, the acquaintance, is going back to her hometown after a 30-year absence to take care of her aging mother. It seems that her schoolmates from all those years ago have been awaiting her reappearance, and it's clear that for quite a few of them, high school never really ended.High school is a strange phenomenon in the US, and Somebody Else's Music brings us inside that strangeness, and lets us see just how devastating it can be for some students. The way the murders play out, and the way the interactions between the characters play out, are rooted in their high school behavior, 32 years later. The characters are real and precisely drawn, and when, finally, Liz Toliver overcomes her past and decides to live NOW, it was all I could do not to stand up and cheer.If you're interested in reading an excellent mystery, beautifully written, read Somebody Else's Music. If you want to read a character study about a woman coming to terms with her past and rising above it, read Somebody Else's Music. And if you want to read what is, after all, an indictment of the foolishness that we Americans indulge ourselves in in high school, read Somebody Else's Music.It's all those things.

Remember High School?

Unfortunately, most of the people in Jane Haddam's new book do - all too well. Gregor Demarkian must leave Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia for a small country town in the Pennsylvania hills (cell phones don't work there because of the mountains). Although 30 years has passed since Betsy Toliver was locked in an outhouse with snakes, neither she nor the perpetrators of this indignity have forgetten - or forgiven. Jane Haddam creates a world of adolescence never outgrown that quite frankly gave me the creeps. The psychological horror unfolds page by page and just when you think you realize what's going on, the plot takes another twist. I loved seeing Demarkian so out of his element. I would have liked more of Bennis, though.