A Patient Death — John Farrow

In John Farrow’s riveting 10th novel featuring his iconic detective É mile Cinq-Mars, an investigation into a peculiar rash of deaths, in which the elderly sitting up straight suddenly “pop off,” lays bare the roots and intricacies of the opioid crisis. Retired from the Montreal Police Service, Cinq-Mars is tapped by a State Trooper to look into deaths being booked as “natural causes.” Should they perhaps be viewed differently, as suspicious? Cinq-Mars’s foray draws him into a mysterious clique of elderly women, working women, and a teenaged girl on crutches, which leads to a harrowing ordeal when he’s struck by an assassin’s bullet. Will death be sufficiently patient with him that from his hospital bed he can resolve how and why the elderly on one side of a state line die quickly and mysteriously while on the other their deaths are slow and agonizing? What is the scheme? Who is behind it all? Will his assassin strike again? As he investigates, and considers a move with his wife to her family home, É mile Cinq-Mars encounters the secrets of a New Hampshire community wracked by tragedy, and meets the valiant women who will struggle to save him, as he has struggled to save them.