Shadow Image

The Underhill family has loomed over Pennsylvania politics for four generations as the most powerful in the state. Now, with their youngest son locked in a tight gubernatorial race, a simple accident threatens to derail the entire campaign. After Floss Underhill, the family matriarch, has been discovered alive after falling from a gazebo into a ravine, Brenna Kennedy gets brought in as a defense attorney to the family. The police don’t seem to believe that her fall was an accident, however, and soon neither does Brenna.

Jim Christensen, a psychologist, memory expert, and Brenna’s partner as they raise their children together, has been studying Floss Underhill for months in a group of Alzheimer’s patients. Her mind ravaged by the disease, her body broken by the fall, Floss Underhill nevertheless knows something, and is trying to tell Christensen a family secret so explosive it could bring down an empire. To help bring it out of her, though, will make them powerful enemies, and bring both the truth—and the danger—very close to home…

“Martin J. Smith writes a damned good whodunit. Shadow Image hooks you … right through to the last page.” —Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Box

“Powerful figures tread a dangerous path through dementia, pity, and murder in Martin J. Smith’s compelling new novel. …No reader will walk away untouched.” —Taylor Smith, author of Random Acts

Psychologist Jim Christensen takes on a touchy, timely subject--the ravages of Alzheimer's and how little is really known about it--in Martin J. Smith's second original paperback featuring Christensen (after the equally tense and strongly written Time Release). It appears that Floss Underhill has attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge on her family's estate outside Pittsburgh, and both Christensen and his live-in lover Brenna Kennedy become involved in the case. Brenna's the lawyer hired by the politically powerful Underhill family to keep a lid on the story. Jim knows Floss from his work at the Alzheimer's research center where she is a longtime patient. As Brenna and Jim arrive at the same conclusion from different angles--that Floss was the victim of attempted murder--their lives and those of their two children from previous marriages are threatened by old and new secrets that bubble up from unexpected sources, including the strangely lucid paintings of a disturbed woman. --Dick Adler

Smith brings back psychologist Jim Christensen (Time Release) in an obvious whodunit set against a truly engaging background of art therapy used to aid Alzheimer's patients. Christensen and his lover Brenna Kennedy, the knockout defense attorney, are caught in the maelstrom when the matriarch of the powerful Underhill family, Floss Underhill, goes over a railing on the family estate. Floss is in the late stages of Alzheimer's, so it is through her paintings that the duo hope to unravel the secrets behind Floss's "accident." The scenes at the Harmony Brain Research Center are fascinating, but unfortunately, Smith's plotting plods, with Jim and Brenna often two steps behind any reader who's ever seen or read a mystery.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.