On his 53rd birthday analyst Dr. Frederick Starks receives a threatening letter which says that the doctor has harmed the life of the writer of the letter and he’ll have to pay for it by killing himself or a relative of his will have to pay unless the doctor solves a riddle of figuring out who the writer is within 30 days. The letter is signed as Rumpelstiltskin. Dr. Starks is puzzled and cannot believe what he has read, but still he calls all his relatives from most of whom he had distanced himself in the past. He finds out that the birthday party of a niece who had the same birthday as him had been ruined by Rumpelstiltskin.
Out of responsibility for the lives of others, he tries to unlock the past. While he’s trying to remember who the person could be, another patient of Starks gets killed under a subway train. Starks knows that the patient was not suicidal and that his death was not an accident and in some way was connected to the letter-writer. He tries to find witnesses to the accident, but can only come up with one, a homeless woman, who tells Starks that a young couple paid her well to tell what she saw. Eventually Starks meets the couple, but only to find out -toward the end of the story- that neither were Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstilskin has planned his revenge to the smallest detail with his course of action resembling identity theft and a string of murders. Soon Starks loses everything, his bank accounts except one, his credit cards, his patients, his reputation, and his homes in Manhattan and Massachusetts. Starks uses all his training and his resources to solve this puzzle. Then he figures out what to do. He plans a fake death-suicide. Afterwards, he assumes fake identities and takes his revenge.

reading non-stop because it holds the reader’s attention in every detail.

the never-ending suspense and the clarity of writing style in spite of a complicated subject matter and a plot of many unexpected twists and turns.

John Katzenbach lives in western Massachusetts and has worked as a criminal court reporter for The Miami Herald and Miami News and has been a featured writer for the Herald’s Tropic magazine.
His novels are: In The Heat Of The Summer,
First Born,
The Mean Season,
The Traveler,
Day Of Reckoning,
Just Cause,
The Shadow Man,
State Of Mind,
Hart's War,
The Analyst.

Most of Katzenbach’s novels has been made into movies such as “In the Heat of the Summer” as “The Mean Season” and others, “The Traveler,” “Day of Reckoning” “Just Cause” “Harts War”

It is very well-written with a language fitting the mood of the story. It is an excellent suspense-murder mystery with psychological twists and the real killers’ identity is the surprise element of the novel.

I started reading this book in an airplane from Florida to New York and didn’t want to let go when the plane landed. It wasn’t only the suspense and the question of “what happened” that grabbed my attention but the richness and the fullness of the characters and the change that some characters went through, especially the main character. An amazing feat for the writer to combine such a plot with such well-drawn characters.

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Created Dec 09, 2003 at 1:01pm • Submit your own review...