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Summary
Summary
When Phil Kramer is shot dead on a deserted suburban street in the middle of the night, his wife, Emily, is left with an emptied bank account and a lot of questions. How could Phil leave her penniless? What was he going to do with the money? And, most of all, who was he if he wasn't the man she thought she married?
Jerry Hobart has some questions of his own. It's none of his business why he was hired to kill Phil Kramer. But now that he's been ordered to take out Kramer's widow, he figures there's a bigger secret at work--and maybe a bigger payoff.
As they race to find the secret Phil Kramer so masterfully hid, both Hobart and Emily must question where their true loyalties lie and how much they owe those who have been unfaithful to them. In Fidelity , Thomas Perry delivers another riveting thriller.
Author Notes
Thomas Perry was born in Tonawanda, New York, in 1947. He graduated from Cornell University in 1969 and earned a Ph. D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester in 1974.
Perry's novels, successful both critically and with the public, are suspenseful as well as comic. Butcher's Boy received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel in 1983, and another one of his novels has been adapted in the movie, The Guide (1999). His other novels include: Death Benefits, Nightlife, Fidelity, and Strip.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Perry (Silence) explores the psychology of identity through his characters' hidden lives in this solid crime thriller. After L.A. PI Phil Kramer is shot dead as he's getting into his car one night on a quiet street, his wife, Emily, and his staff set out to find whodunit and why. As they dig, Emily discovers Phil had many secrets. Meanwhile, Jerry Hobart, the hired gun, is ordered to kill Emily. Suspicious of his client's motives, Jerry starts investigating his client, who, the reader learns, is Ted Forrest, a wealthy playboy with a secret life. Perry initially shifts between Emily and Jerry's points-of-view as each probes different aspects of the same crime to zero in on Ted's motives. As Ted starts dominating the narrative, the pacing, usually one of Perry's strongest suits, slows, weighed down with too many characters and subplots. Still, Perry intrigues as always with spare, intelligent prose. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A private eye's wife and former partner goes back on the job to find out who made her a widow. The shock Emily Kramer feels when her husband is shot down on a strange street deepens when she learns that he's cleaned out his retirement account, their savings account, even the household account, and that Kramer Investigations is broke as well. Clearly Phil Kramer was hiding something big from her. Phil has been a man of many secrets, any of which could have gotten him killed. Nor is Emily the only one who's looking for them, as she realizes when a masked man takes her prisoner, interrogates her about Phil's work and threatens to kill her if she doesn't share the information he insists she must have about his last case. Jerry Hobart, the hit man who killed her husband, has accepted a new contract to kill Emily. But he's decided that instead of collecting $200,000 from millionaire Theodore Forrest for a simple job, he'd rather uncover the secret that made Phil's life so dangerous that Ted Forrest couldn't afford to leave him alive. The pattern soon resolves itself into one of Perry's patented triangular competitions. Emily races to track down her husband's biggest secret before the masked man can find it. Jerry, discounting her claims that she knows nothing, keeps her in his sights while he hunts the information that will make her dispensable. And Forrest takes strong measures to make sure that the unsavory details of the case Phil worked for him nine years ago never see the light of day. The characters aren't among Perry's most memorable, and the suspense is moderate by his high standards. But the back stories the tale requires are integrated into the action a lot more smoothly than they were in Silence (2007). Mid-grade thrills from a pro's pro. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Perry remains a kind of literary alchemist, able to mix often-incompatible elements, intricate plotting and subtle characterization, into crime-fiction gold. Here he begins with a gripping set-piece: the murder of private investigator Phil Kramer, who, we quickly learn, kept secrets: from his wife, Emily; from his colleagues in the PI firm he ran; and from the other women in his life. One of those secrets got him killed, and two people are desperate to find out what it was: Phil's killer, who hopes to use the secret to extort the man who hired him (and has now rehired him to kill Emily, too), and Emily, who needs to understand her husband if she is to save her own life. Perry dexterously juggles point of view between Emily, Phil's killer, and the man pulling the strings three unreliable narrators who only know part of the story, forcing us to attempt our own synthesis. But beyond the three-cornered suspense generated by the intricate narrative, Perry gives us three remarkably rich characters, whose multiple shades of gray are delineated so crisply as to form the subtlest of rainbows. This is fine writing from one of crime fiction's grand masters.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college - brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary. He stayed up 72 hours reading Goethe. He filled a 50-page notebook with tiny scrawled notes about Henry James. (These weren't class assignments.) He loved absolute principles and what he called "the timeless." He railed against hypocrisy. He liked to stand outside fraternities and shout lines from Byron. When a poem offended him, he ate it - crumple, chew, swallow - and ended up with an intestinal blockage. My friends and I loved Kurt, and we worried about him. "The Other" is a novel about a Kurt who goes off the rails and ends up living as a hermit in a remote forest in Washington State. The author is David Guterson, of "Snow Falling on Cedars" fame. The recluse is John William Barry, sole heir to a banking and timber fortune. John William, as his friends call him, is as old-school Seattle as it gets. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Denny Party, whose members founded the city in 1851. In the Northwest, this is akin to May-flower lineage. John William is a smart, troubled rich kid who loathes phonies and sellouts, beginning with his own "weaseling, demonic forefathers." He's the kind of guy who drops acid and chants, "No escape from the unhappiness machine." John William tries to escape the machine by taking the hermit's path, holing up in the woods for seven long, cold, lonely years. In "The Other," the hermit's story is told in retrospect by his best friend, Neil Countryman, an English teacher who emerges as the book's most interesting character. They'd make a good buddy movie, Countryman and the hermit. They meet at a high school track meet in 1972. John William runs for Lakeside, Seattle's elite prep school (and Bill Gates's alma mater). Countryman, the son of a carpenter, runs for Roosevelt, a working-class public school. Like many wealthy, virile boys in Seattle, John William tests himself by climbing in the Cascades, where he and Countryman forge a friendship through wilderness-survival adventures. They also smoke a lot of dope around a lot of campfires as John William blathers on about Gnosticism and teases Countryman about his dream of becoming a writer. "'Lackey,' he would say, about half sardonically. 'Fame and money for prostituting your soul. Minister of Information for the master class.'" Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad's firm by 35. Not John William. He drops out of college, buys a mobile home, parks it by a remote river on the Olympic Peninsula and spends his days reading Gnostic theology. When even that seems too decadent, he carves a cave out of limestone and retreats into the gloom. While John William builds a cave, Neil Countryman builds a life. He gets married, buys a house, has kids. But he never abandons John William. Countryman treks through dense forest to bring his friend food and medicine. He and the hermit conspire to fake John William's disappearance in Mexico, to give him some relief from his worried parents. After a while, Countryman realizes his old friend isn't going to grow out of this Han-Shan-in-the-cave period. "So what, exactly, is the deal with you?" Countryman asks during an exasperated moment. John William's answer: "I don't want to participate." But Countryman keeps pressing. "Idiot," John William finally replies. "You've got your whole life in front of you, maybe 50 or 60 years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die?" Well, yes. "The Other" is a moving portrait of male friendship, the kind that forms on the cusp of adulthood and refuses to die, no matter how maddening the other guy turns out to be. It's also a finely observed rumination on the necessary imperfection of life - on how hypocrisy, compromise and acceptance creep into our lives and turn strident idealists into kind, loving, fully human adults. Wisdom isn't the embrace of everything we rejected at 19. It's the understanding that absolutes are for dictators and fools. "I'm a hypocrite, of course," Countryman says, reflecting on his own life and John William's doomed pursuit of purity. "I live with that, but I live." David Guterson broke out of the box nearly 15 years ago with his wildly successful debut novel. Neither of his subsequent novels, "East of the Mountains" and "Our Lady of the Forest," has matched that first book's sales, but here's the admirable thing: His books keep getting better. There's a deus ex machina at the end of this new one that, a little disappointingly, plants guilt for John William's struggles at the feet of a certain suspect. But the voice of Neil Countryman is that of a good, thoughtful man coming into middle-class, middle-aged fullness, and his recollections of life in Seattle have a wonderful richness and texture. This Seattle isn't just a trendy backdrop peopled with Starbucks-sippers at the Pike Place Market. Guterson's characters live in the city as it really is. They grab fish and chips at Spud on Green Lake, browse for used books at Shorey's, trip on the mushrooms that grow wild in Ravenna Park. Guterson knows Seattle the way Updike knows small-town Pennsylvania, and there are moments in "The Other" that have a "Rabbit at Rest" quality, as tossed-off observations and bits of dialogue capture the essence of a place and a time. In the early years of his friendship with John William, Countryman wanders through the Barry home, a Laurelhurst Tudor, noticing the white-bellied nudes on the bathroom wallpaper - I've been in that house, or at least its neighbor. Decades later, he listens to his son suggesting they eat at a new brewpub that specializes in mussels and frites - I've been there, too. The beauty is that Guterson doesn't stop to explain. He just drops in these pitch-perfect notes and keeps the music going. Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw." He fives in Seattle.
Library Journal Review
In this high-energy thriller, Emily Kramer tries to find out why her husband, Phil, was shot dead and discovers he'd been keeping secrets from her. Jerry Hobart completed his contract killing of Phil Kramer, but now his employer wants Phil's wife dead as well; Jerry decides he can instead make more money finding out what his employer is hiding. And rich, successful Ted Forrest likes young women--really young women. This predisposition got him into trouble once before, and he's not going to let it happen again. A virtue of Edgar Award winner Perry's (Silence) novel is that the bad guy draws you in. You can't dismiss Jerry as simply evil--he kills ruthlessly but not needlessly; his heart aches for a lost past, and he admires the woman he's paid to kill. A spunky but believable heroine, an emotionally conflicted killer, a plot whose twists you will not anticipate--what more could a reader want from a piece of escapist fiction? Fidelity is a winner. But, then, Perry has never written a bad novel in his life. Recommended for all public libraries.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.