A Death Most Quiet details the riveting criminal investigations of Captain Edward McCuen as he leads the NYPDâs Crime Scene Unit on a relentless pursuit of three elusive serial killers.
With the help of his team, McCuen follows a trail of mysterious murders alongside an eccentric mathematician named Anselm Winterbottom, who McCuen has secretly leveraged as an investigatory consultant. The two men have a turbulent friendship, and it soon becomes clear that Winterbottomâs ultimate aim is far from altruistic. While their alliance is tested, a crime reporter seeks to uncover the true identity of the man who is helping McCuen.
As the hunters become the hunted, this three-part crime thriller delves into the dark corners of human nature, murder, and madness, staged amidst the landmarks of New York City, and the cultural treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A Death Most Quiet details the riveting criminal investigations of Captain Edward McCuen as he leads the NYPDâs Crime Scene Unit on a relentless pursuit of three elusive serial killers.
With the help of his team, McCuen follows a trail of mysterious murders alongside an eccentric mathematician named Anselm Winterbottom, who McCuen has secretly leveraged as an investigatory consultant. The two men have a turbulent friendship, and it soon becomes clear that Winterbottomâs ultimate aim is far from altruistic. While their alliance is tested, a crime reporter seeks to uncover the true identity of the man who is helping McCuen.
As the hunters become the hunted, this three-part crime thriller delves into the dark corners of human nature, murder, and madness, staged amidst the landmarks of New York City, and the cultural treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It took me three years working as a crime reporter for the Times before I learned who he was. And once I knew his name, there was no letting go. Being on the outside, I only saw glimpses of the whole, otherwise obscure vignettes, seen alongside anecdotes, told to me by those who knew him. They were like old photographs seen through a stereoscope. Maybe thatâs an unfair reference for a modern world. Then again, perhaps thatâs the best way to explain it.
Knowing what I know now, I canât say that my search was abundantly fruitful. I donât know that anyone will ever understand him, but Iâve tried. And in trying, Iâve found myself to have more in common with him than Iâm comfortable with. Any judgments about the person, or what heâs done; I leave it to you, to make up your mind. In general, Iâd say that at our worst weâre all capable of terrible and ugly things. At times when Iâm most hopeful, I think we all deserve another day, and maybe even one more after that.
Itâs a cynical view of the world, but itâs not unfounded. Naturally, I didnât start out this way, but I canât remember a time when it wasnât there. Being a witness to the crimes and violence, night after night, can turn a man toward pessimism, but the bureaucracy of the job made it even worse. As journalists, we were fighting for scraps; looking for anything that wasnât fed to us by the NYPD. There was rarely anything to be had. The days of print news were all but over. It had been dying for decades, though no one wanted to admit it. Paper is for the purists, and in case you havenât heard, there arenât too many of those around anymore. Once the NYPD started using Twitter, it was all over. Social media and self-published press releases allowed the department to control the narrative, avoid hard questions, and inform the public faster than we ever could. I did my best to portray the truth as I saw it, but we were all pulling water from the same well. We were all telling the same story, in the same language. After three years of self-imposed insomnia, my life seemed to mimic the nocturnal habits of a fruit bat. Only after this realization did I resign myself to re-wording press releases, like everyone else. I can say that I was one of a few who still went out to crime scenes; the last of the 3 A.M. radio-vampires. Iâd like to say I did it out of professional pride, but it was equally a matter of personal curiosity.
Until that point, the great love of my life had been literature. From Faulkner to Plathâs Bell Jar, and the great Truman Capote, I had long been enamored by diction and the confines of the page. But now that was changing. It was as if those hours spent in the company of such writers had been a preamble. Theyâd been pointing me toward it all along. Yes, the crimes were often hideous and unsightly, but they were more than that. It was human nature in its truest and most unabridged form, and it was there for anyone to see, if they cared to look for it.
It was around that time that the lines between work and my personal life became blurred. Not long after they were indiscernible. I found myself more interested in the anthropology of it all, and I focused more on causality rather than brevity and word count. The facts relative to crime reporting seemed to matter less than the crimes themselves. I wanted to know the dark mechanics of it, its movements and subtle gestures. Were some people just bad; irredeemably predestined? Or was it something that we all had a share in, a common strand of corruptibility that made otherwise good people do devious things? Was it a sudden drop, like a cut elevator cable, or was it a slow, tectonic slide, akin to the earth moving under our feet? Capote warned about giving your heart to a such a wild thing.
Because of these questions, I became a student again, and although I wasnât far from Cooper Square, this wasnât NYU. How does one learn about such intricacies from a distance; from outside the crime scene tape? Sure, I could acquire the distilled, underlying facts, but the emotional substance and physical palpability of murder and madness were always just out of reach. I wasnât getting the answers I was looking for, so I went to find my own subject. I had learned all that I could from books. There was only one option left. I began responding to suicides.
Every correspondent in the city would turn up for the homicides, but no one cared about the suicides; in Hollywood maybe, but rarely in New York. No one wanted to hear about the lonely death of an otherwise forgettable person; certainly not in the open folds over Sunday breakfast. But for me, these deaths held all the forensic elements of a murder, because the inarguable fact remained that someone was killed by a person. They held the tragic evidence of motive, and mental illness, loneliness and death; often paired with the violence of a murder. These secret characteristics, still reverently held, were less guarded than those of a criminal nature. Police procedure was far less stringent, because a suicide would never go to trial. There was no crime, no suspect, no victim; at least not as far as the State was concerned. After months of quiet attendance, and much to my surprise, police investigators began allowing me unprecedented access to these scenes. I was let in with the strict understanding that I wouldnât report the details of the suicides, or disclose the names of the deceased. They recognized in me a shared interest, and in return I kept my promise. I became an ally, and eventually a friend to many of the patrolmen and investigators of the NYPD who served as my guides, like Virgil, through those deep places where the sun is silent. My education had begun, and it was through these unnamed tragedies that I came to know the stench of decomposition, the shot patterns of a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the life cycle of blow flies.
Prior to that, I was sure that things happened for a reason and that we lived in a world that was relatively safe and peaceful; a believable fiction with all the relevance of a destination wedding. I untied my blindfold and turned my back on the mirage. Some people have their fitness clubs and Caribbean vacations. I had Friday night photo-sharing with the interns at the Medical Examinerâs Office, and âoff-the-recordâ choir practice with officers from the 13th Precinct.
In those early years, what proved to be most significant was the fragile trust of an NYPD detective, Edward McCuen. He would become the Captain of the NYPDâs Crime Scene Unit, responsible for the forensic investigation of every major homicide in the five boroughs. For years, I preserved his trust and enjoyed his friendship, while I pursued a carefully guarded secret âhis secret: a man named Anselm Winterbottom.
I first saw Winterbottom in January 2010, at the scene of what would later become known as âThe Flatbush Killingsâ. I knew most of the detectives in all the major crime units, if not by name, then by face. But he was a stranger. In his late forties, he had dark brown hair and sheltered an average build beneath a drab, canvas field jacket; the kind often worn by bird-hunters. You could imagine my surprise when I watched this stranger get escorted beneath the tape, to meet directly with Captain McCuen. I began seeing him at every major crime scene, but he was never so openly on display. It made me wonder how long heâd gone unnoticed, giving rise to the possibility that Iâd been seeing him for years without realizing it. After months of contemplation, I felt compelled to ask McCuen about him. When I did, my friend of many years paused for a moment, sipped his coffee and said, âI donât know who youâre talking aboutâand you canât ever ask me about him again.â As his friend, I took comfort in the fact that he didnât lie to me outright, but I felt slighted by his abrupt refusal to say any more. From that moment on, I couldnât let it go. I needed to know who he was, and the more time that passed without answers, the more determined I became. I knew even early on that Iâd have to betray my friend to learn his secret.
In writing this, Iâll tell you what I know; less from my recollections, and more from those of my reticent friend, Captain Edward McCuen. It wasnât until after his retirement from the NYPD, that he spoke more candidly about his enigmatic friend, Anselm Winterbottom. I learned a great deal, and yet some things he kept hidden from me, even in the days before he died. I felt like he was protecting someone, or maybe he was just keeping an old promiseâsecrets told to the wind will surely be revealed to the trees. Even now, Iâm haunted by a few unanswered questions. The worst part is, I donât know if they even matter. I suppose thatâs the difference between curiosity and obsession. Thereâs always one more unanswered question.
The events of most interest began in late September when the nights fall heaviest in lower Manhattan. The hours just after midnight had passed into relative obscurity, except for a murder-suicide on Monroe Street. I heard the call come over the police frequency and those of us on scene had already put most of the pieces together. It was an old familiar swan song. Wife cheats on husband; husband kills wife, then turns the gun on himself. I wasnât at all surprised to see McCuen standing in the doorway. It was in moments like these that I admired him most. His dedication was eternal. I had met his wife, Catherine, and she was remarkable, but I found it difficult to believe that she could be so understanding of his absence, so regularly. Iâm sure that it took its toll. Yet, there he was, like Wellington at Waterloo, right in the thick of it.
As personnel from the Medical Examinerâs office carried two amorphous body bags from the entryway, McCuenâs cell phone rang. I watched as he bowed his head in quiet disappointment, signaling that the night was still young. He had hours to go before heâd sleep. Given the distance between us, I couldnât make out what he was saying, but I could tell it was bad news. When he hung up the phone he quickly dialed an uncatalogued, but well-memorized phone number. I moved closer and strained to hear.
âI have something for you,â said McCuen. âThe Bethesda Fountainâwhen can you be there?â
Just then a transmission crackled over the radio of a nearby patrolman. A body had been found in Central Park.
Ed McCuen is a New York Detective who is willing to do whatever it takes to stop criminals from killing in his city, no matter the cost. He has solved his share of cases and seen his share of action but on occasion there are cases that pop up that even he can't solve. In those situations he teams up with Anselm Winterbottom, an eccentric mathematician who has seen his own share of tragedy. Winterbottom's mind works like no one else's and he can find clues others miss. When McCuen asks for Winterbottom's help on three unusual cases, secrets are revealed, lives are lost and saved and both McCuen and Winterbottom have to ask themselves what doing the right thing really means.
While this book is a murder mystery it would be more accurate to say it is three murder mysteries in one book. The mysteries are all inventive and leave the reader guessing as to who the perpetrator is and whether or not they will be caught.
At the same time, the book does a nice job taking the reader into the emotional journey of both McCuen and Winterbottom as the two of them come into inevitable conflict. While it would not be fair to give major plot points away in a review, I can say the answers in all three mysteries surprised me and had me guessing all the way until the end.
It could be argued that the character of the crime reporter was a bit underdeveloped but this is only a minor complaint. It was difficult to find plot holes in the mystery and the pages keep turning to find out the conclusion.
If you like Sherlock Holmes but with a modern spin or books by authors like Harlan Coben consider giving A Death Most Quiet a try. I don't think you will be disappointed.