World of Hurt

Harvey Blissberg Mystery #4

by R.D. Rosen

With World of Hurt, his first new novel in six years, Rosen returns with a tour-de-force tale of real estate deception and psychological abuse. When real estate agent Larry Peplow is found murdered in a desolate field, the search for his killer takes retired baseball player-turned-private investigator Harvey Blissberg from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to affluent Chicago suburbs to the coast of Maine...and to some places not found in any atlas.
Lured into the investigation by his older brother, Norm, Harvey leaves Boston, his troubled relationship with live-in love Mickey Slavin, and his new therapist to follow the trail of damaged souls that ends at Larry Peplow's corpse. No one seems to know much about Peplow - just that he'd last lived in Maine, that he was part of Norm's regular pickup basketball game, and that just before his head was blown off he'd told a little real estate lie...
In World of Hurt, everyone lies - even Harvey falls into the habit - but the biggest fabrication of all turns out to be Larry Peplow himself. Discovering his secrets takes time, for his murder conceals another, much slower death that is all but forgotten. The pieces that Harvey slowly puts together are painful, and the final puzzle is a picture of madness, sadness, and murderous rage.

Genres: Mystery

303 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Richard Dean Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead (1984), the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. Blissberg's adventures continued in four sequels, including Fadeaway (1986) and Saturday Night Dead (1988), which drew on Rosen's stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live.

Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
 
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.

Reviews

[John Stanley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and much better than the previous book. IAnd while there's really not any more action thatn previous books, it's just more interesting than his last one ("Saturday Night Dead") and, overall I think, a better mystery. Also, it's a fatter book with more time spent on the characters which, I think, helps.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t know this was part of a series, so just delved right in. The writing, character building and mystery elements were all superb. I’m not usually drawn to mystery books, but was intrigued with the cover. 5 stars!

[Jill Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harvey Blissberg is a retired baseball player who is the fictional creation of Richard Rosen and the subject of five mysteries written in the 1980's and 1990's. They've been out of print for a while but have been reissued in ebook form. "World of Hurt" is the fourth book in the series. I had read all of them when they were first issued and I'm pleased to see they've been reissued. I started my rereading with "World of Hurt" and I think Rosen's writing has "held up" as time has passed.

Harvey Blissberg retired from baseball after many years with both the Boston Red Sox and the fictional expansion team in Providence, Rhode Island. He's still young and doesn't quite know what to do with himself. He's solved some crimes previously and so decides to become a private detective. Blissberg has a reputation in baseball as a thinking sort of guy; a "professor" as a former teammate refers to him. He's living in Boston with his girlfriend/partner, sports broadcaster Mickey Slavin, but their relationship is a bit at sixes-and-sevens. Neither wants to get married, but both seek the emotional commitment that marriage somehow brings. In "World of Hurt", Harvey is asked to come to Chicago by his older brother - a "real" professor at Northwestern - and look into the murder of a friend of his. When Harvey begins to investigate the murder of Lawrence Peplow, a real estate agent in Chicago's North Shore suburbs, he discovers that Peplow is not exactly who he purported himself to be. Dark secrets from Peplow's past on the East Coast start to emerge as Blissberg asks questions. One of the people he interviews is Marilyn Barger, a not-so-happily married tennis player who becomes more involved with Harvey than he wanted. Harvey does solve the case, but as in many mysteries, the characters are more interesting than the plot.

Another mystery writer whose work reminds me of Richard Rosen's is Lawrence Block. Block is a more prolific writer than Rosen, but one of Block's characters - Matthew Scudder - seems a lot of Harvey Blissberg. Both are "cerebral" detectives and the books' plots are often overshadowed by the characters. Block and Rosen both use dialog to move their plots, which I really don't think is easily done. Both writers do it well, though. It's also amusing to see a world without cell-phones or personal computers. Written in the early 1990's, "car phones" (remember those?) are in use and the police have computers to access information, but otherwise, modern-day communications are not used. (It's a bit like reading Sue Grafton mystery and realising in 2014 that her books take place in the 1980's!) And, since I'm a native of the Chicago North Shore, I was amused at Rosen's descriptions of the area and its people, though a bit perplexed at trying to figure out which real suburb matched which fictional one.

I'm glad Richard Rosen's series has been released. If you've read and enjoyed them before, they're back and if you haven't read them, you're in for a treat. (I do have to add to this review that I was Richard Rosen's travel agent when he was writing the Blissberg mysteries, but I would have enjoyed them even without the persona