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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY WIL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | MYSTERY WIL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
At thirty-two, Benjamin Justice was one of Los Angeles best known journalists. He had the respect and envy of his colleagues, the admiration of his employers and the ear of the city's population. Until he won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his features and everything came crashing down. Found to have invented the subjects of his piece, Justice was forced to return the Pulitzer, was fired from his job, and became a pariah to most of his former colleagues.
Now in his mid-forties, still considered a disgrace to his former profession, HIV-positive, and once again single, Justice has once again begun to put his life back together. Under contract to a major publisher to write his autobiography, Benjamin Justice is trying to put all the elements of his life into perspective for the first time. While searching out a priest from his childhood, Justice enlists his closest friend's fianc - a columnist for the Los Angeles Times - to bring pressure upon the powers that be to reveal the long-hidden truth about this almost forgotten priest. Then his friend's fianc is killed in a tragic hit-and-run accident and Justice is called upon to look into the mysterious circumstances of the too-convenient accident. Reluctant at first, Justice soon finds himself in the midst of a complex case involving a decades old child murder, a powerful and controversial Cardinal, and elements of his own dark past.
John Morgan Wilson's Edgar and Lambda Literary Award winning Benjamin Justice novels are amongst the most highly regarded and widely praised crime fiction to have emerged in the past decade. Now, in Blind Eye , Benjamin Justice returns in the most compelling and controversial novel yet in this not-to-be missed series.
Author Notes
John Morgan Wilson is the author of four previous novels featuring Benjamin Justice and is the co-author of Blue Moon with Peter Duchin. He won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for Simple Justice and the Lambda Literary Award for Justice at Risk and The Limits of Justice . He lives in West Hollywood, California.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-winner Wilson (Simple Justice) was certainly ahead of the news curve when he invented a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter disgraced and fired for inventing sources. Now, in his fifth book about Benjamin Justice, Wilson again mines recent headlines, sending his wounded hero on a quest for the Catholic priest who molested him when he was 12 years old. It's a viable idea, and the HIV-positive Justice has some interesting edges, but the author seems determined to test him-and his readers-with so much high-impact paranoia that the story quickly goes over the top. The trouble starts when Joe Soto, the ace Los Angeles Times columnist engaged to Justice's friend Alexandra Templeton, shows Justice an outline for a book he plans to write about an infamous assassin who works for various drug cartels. Then Joe obligingly writes a story about Justice's missing priest and is promptly murdered by a hit-and-run driver outside a restaurant. Was it the assassin? Or could it have been a suspicious-looking police detective who lusts after Alexandra? How about a hit man hired by the increasingly edgy Los Angeles archbishop and his chief aide, who offer Justice a million dollars to drop his investigation into the pedophile priest? Long before the frantic ending in a new cathedral being built at vast expense in downtown L.A., most readers will have concluded that the point of wretched excess has already been achieved. Agent, Alice Martell. (Oct. 6) FYI: Wilson is the coauthor with Peter Duchin of Blue Moon (Forecasts, Sept. 23, 2002). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
At a time when so many mystery and suspense novels rely not on a compelling major character who embodies a moral center in a world gone awry, but instead on the glitter and glitz of exotic locales and high-tech chases, Wilson's latest, outstanding Benjamin Justice mystery, thanks to its dark, groping, fatally flawed, but redeemable hero, comes like food to starving genre buffs. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who later had to surrender the award because he had invented sources, Justice floundered for years after--years of decline and drinking, punctuated by a few, successful, free-lance gigs combining journalistic research and private investigation. Now, he is HIV-positive but regrouping and writing his autobiography. Flashbacks from his own childhood molestation by a priest dovetail with the murder of a journalist who was investigating the Catholic Church's cover-up of an L.A. priest's sordid activities. When Justice, a prete manque in so many ways, looks into the crime, he advances to new levels of risk and confrontation, both within himself and without. At its best, Wilson's work recalls the best of Graham Greene's mysteries. He writes meditations on repentance and forgiveness as well as whodunits, giving discerning readers reason to rejoice. His contemplation of the anguished soul and its redemption makes him Greene's heir apparent and the savior of the mystery as morality play. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2003 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Disgraced ex-reporter Benjamin Justice goes up against his most fearsome adversary yet--the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Twenty years before he won the Pulitzer Prize, young Benjamin was the target of Father Stuart Blackley's advances. Now Justice has received a $150,000 advance to tell everything from how he shot the father who was abusing his sister to how he was fired over the confiscated Pulitzer, and he plans to give Father Blackley a prominent place in his autobiography. When he goes fishing, however, he finds that Blackley left Buffalo for LA years ago, died in a hiking accident, and is a topic LA Bishop Anthony Finatti, Blackley's old friend, doesn't want to discuss. Frustrated at being stonewalled, Justice allows Joe Soto, the LA Times columnist secretly engaged to Justice's old friend Alexandra Templeton, to go public with Blackley's history--and then reacts with horror and guilt (not for the last time) as Joe's killed in a well-planned hit-and-run hours after his column runs. Was the killer behind the wheel penny-dreadful Pablo Zuniga, the freelance assassin on whom Joe had been planning a book, or someone in Cardinal Kendall Doyle's office who didn't want anyone spoiling Doyle's candidacy to become the next pope? Or are those two alternatives really so distinct? Though unlikely to get the Church's imprimatur, Justice's fifth (Justice at Risk, 1999, etc.) is his finest yet: a white-hot exposÉ fueled by anger, bewilderment, and pain. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
