Dead Center
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Twenty years after a shooting death deemed accidental, a respected pediatrician is charged with murdering a man who had been his friend. In those intervening years, the pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Weber, has married his friend's widow and adopted their two children. And during those years, he has proven himself to be a devoted father and spouse as well as a trusted physician. Dr. Weber pleads innocent, and his wife believes him. His grown daughters Laura and Lin believe him. Or do they?
As the novel evolves, the mystery at its center deepens into an exploration of divided loyalties and precarious family relationships, of children's need to believe in conflict with their desire for truth. This suspenseful novel combines elements of the conventional murder mystery and courtroom drama, but goes beyond these into that greater drama of the human heart in conflict with itself. Inspired by an actual case, Dead Center is really an ancient story in contemporary guise, one wherein betrayal blurs with love, evil with good, hatred with forgiveness, and guilt with innocence. It is also the story of a family that has been wrenched apart by loss for a second time but not, finally, destroyed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Higgins's sharply probing novel, her first since A Soldier's Book (1998), Laura Weber and her sister, Lin, grow up knowing that their father, Pete Hyland, died in a hunting accident when they were quite young. Their mother, Karen, later married Dr. Ben Weber, who became their loving stepfather. Weber and Hyland were hunting together when Hyland was fatally shot in what was quickly and quietly dismissed as an accident. Eighteen years later, the investigation was reopened, and two years later, Weber was arrested and extradited from the family's Hawaii home to Tunley, Mich., where the shooting took place. As the kids gather to support their parents at the hearing and then the trial, details emerge that rock and test them all. Based on a true incident, Higgins's psychologically acute story deftly illuminates the complexities that bind and separate an American family.
