A Body for a Buddy

Matt Erridge #20

by Aaron Marc Stein

After twenty years Matt Erridge has gone back to his college reunion. There were the old friendships, and with his old buddies he picks up as though the two decades were but a moment gone. There was also an old enmity. Picking up on that took longer, but the old animosity revived. But before he can grow sentimental about memories of sowing wild oats, death intervenes, sudden and ugly. Since all the evidence says murder, carefully planned and maliciously calculated toward throwing suspicion Matt's way, he cannot consider himself uninvolved. Violence follows on murder and then murder strikes again. Has someone declared open season on the widows of friends and classmates? One thing becomes inescapably the killer is one of the old crowd, a member of the illustrious class. So Erridge has to know. Who had done him this unwelcome service? Who had provided A BODY FOR A BUDDY?

189 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Aaron Marc Stein was an American novelist. Born in New York City and educated at Princeton, Stein worked as a journalist in the 1920s and 1930s before becoming a full-time fiction writer. During WWII he worked for the Office of War Information and did Army work in Chinese and Japanese translation. Stein wrote under the pseudonyms of George Babgy (the Inspector Schmidt series) and Hampton Stone (stories about NY Assistant DA, Jeremiah Gibson). Under his own name Stein has created the archaeologist detectives Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, and the hard-bitten engineer Matt Erridge.