A Clowder of Cats

About the Book

Doctor Samuel X. Robley has today September 11, 1936 given the hospitalized eighty-year old white millionaire Ben Zee a chilling death sentence. He has been given less than a week to live and it hits him hard, harder than he’d expected. However someone won’t or can’t wait the week out and kills him that very night in his hospital bed.

Philadelphia Homicide detective Terry Reudel is assigned the case and to his dismay and confusion told to concentrate on the deceased’s two mulatto grandchildren Mary and Steven or else, the motive expected being money. At first it appears to be an open and shut case but as Reudel sullenly delves into the old man’s past the suspects start popping up all over the place. The old man had a very bloody and ruthless past and thus had a legion of personal and business enemies thirsting for his death. Add his racially mixed and willful family violently torn apart by their own agendas and simmering racial issues and you have a recipe for mayhem.

The deeper Reudel gets into the case the more he questions not only the suspects and their motives but himself and his very own hard won personal beliefs. He discovers as well how pervasively influential and subtlety compelling are the unseen, and usually unknown influences of this world’s past history are on us all. In the end Reudel realizes that now he also is being changed forever by his own and the old man’s unimagined past.