Deadstick by Terence Faherty
Deadstick by Terence Faherty
An Owen Keane Mystery
Owen Keane, failed seminarian, once hoped to find cosmic answers in human mysteries, but he's traded that quest for a nine-to-five job at a New York law firm and a quiet life. Quiet, that is, until a cryptic request for information on an accident that took the lives of a playboy aviator and his fiancée cracks the solid earth beneath Keane’s feet and pitches him once again into darkness and doubt.
The Mystery Company reintroduces Owen Keane with this 20th anniversary edition of Deadstick, Terence Faherty's Edgar Award nominated first novel.
Paperback | ISBN: 978-1-932325-17-1 | 2011
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Marilyn Stasio reviewed the first edition of Deadstick in The New York Times Book Review (11/3/1991):
“My problem,” admits Owen Keane, “ [is] a mind that tends to wander dangerously without occupation.” Too flighty a mind for his pragmatic girlfriend, and much too unpredictable to suit the lawyer who employs him as a legal researcher, it’s a nice mind, nonetheless, for a metaphysical detective — the role that Keane plays in Terence Faherty’s intriguing first mystery, Deadstick.
Keane’s little brain cells warn him that something’s odd about his assignment to look into a plane crash that took the lives of a young banker and his fiancee 40 years ago....
Keane abandons his careful methods of library research for face-to-face interviews and field study, including an atmospheric trek through the treacherous New Jersey Pine Barrens, where the plane went down. As the moody hero suspected, the answer to the mystery is a sad one, but worth the pursuit for the existential lesson he takes from it — to keep searching for the tiny bits of mental order that keep at bay that “archenemy” of the thinking man, “the idea that the universe is godless and capricious, without pattern or meaning.”
No guns, no gore, but plenty of intellectual guts.