The Murder of Marabeth Waters

The midnight murder of a prostitute, who was strangled to death with a red cord, appears to be an easy case to solve. Inside Marabeth Waters' handbag, Detective Devin Driver finds a threatening note that leads him to Mark Sievers, a teacher at a local community college. Mark supposedly has an alibi since he claims that he spent the night with "Ambrosia," one of the students in his advanced English class. But when Devin talks to Ambrosia, who appears to be drunk, she gives him a number of contradictory statements: Maybe she had only been with Mark from 9-11 P.M.; maybe he had stayed until 1 A.M.; maybe she had spent the whole night with him. Or maybe, to be frank, this is a novel that continually returns to the oily pool of dark satire and sticky black humor from which it arose. At any rate, Ambrosia isn't the only one with a drinking problem—ever since Devin's wife died of cancer about six months before Marabeth's murder, Devin has been hitting the sauce to the tune of somewhere between a pint and a fifth of vodka a day. Now forty-four, Devin views himself as a sexual outcast since none of the women he's really attracted to—ages eighteen to twenty five—are showing any interest in him. So all he's left with are older women and all the baggage that they carry around—maybe they're overweight or mean or ugly or have some nasty skeletons in their closets. Devin isn't a particularly sharp detective—inwardly, he refers to himself as a right-time and right-place detective. In other words, if he finds a guy standing over the body of his murdered wife with a smoking gun in his hand, Devin knows that he'll be able to figure the whole thing out unless there's some trick twist to the whole thing. But Marabeth's case appears to be child's play because while Devin is searching Mark's car, he discovers a small bloody fragment of Marabeth's blouse on the floor of the back seat, and when a DNA test confirms that the blood on the fragment is Marabeth's blood, the case is essentially over. Or is it? Even though the trial of Mark Sievers is a slam dunk for the prosecution and results in an easy conviction, the case takes an unexpected turn when another woman is found strangled to death with a red cord around her neck. What follows afterwards is a wayward descent into the mind of a serial killer who has been able to remain in obscurity despite committing a number of blunders in the commission of his crimes. Of course, when the detective investigating the case is drunk and incompetent, a lot of strange things can happen…