Intersections

by Susan Sample

Too often, the victim at the center of a murder mystery is tangential to the story being told—it’s hard to care that they’re dead. Mark Crichton is no such man, and Intersections is not that novel. At first blush, when Mark is killed on a hot night in St. Louis, he seems to be a familiar victim of a not uncommon shooting in a bad neighborhood. That, however, is a odd ending for a university professor, and from that point, the story goes in both directions: toward the future and into the past. We immediately know that Mark is a riddle of a person, and this, above all, is a story about real people, funny, sad, or mean. His wife still likes him, but his girlfriend’s sister despises him as an abusive lout. The mystery of Mark’s life and death is revealed through memories of those whose lives intersected with his, in large ways and small. The ER doctor remembers taking a class with him a decade ago, but cannot reconcile that with what she sees now; his wife counts how many times you can lose the same person without shattering; and his best friend finds himself battling his uncle, the detective on the case, along with his own grief-driven guilt. The answer to the question of who killed Mark and why is only one mystery in this novel. Who Mark really is, how he arrives at that intersection in that moment, and how his death will make the lives of all those people around him shift course, is the central story here. Intersections is a mystery about people making their way through life and death, through tragedy and love. It’s about a man who lost his life, and could never really get over it.

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2013

Reviews

[Tegan Quigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable read

I enjoyed the book. I only put it down to cook dinner. It had a nice story. Of course I may be a tad biased. I very much enjoyed the descriptions of real places, they were real to life.