Asylum

Jeannette de Beauvoir

Book - 2015

"Martine LeDuc is the director of PR for the mayor's office in Montreal. When four women are found brutally murdered and shockingly posed on park benches throughout the city over several months, Martine's boss fears a PR disaster for the still busy tourist season, and Martine is now also tasked with acting as liaison between the mayor and the police department. The women were of varying ages, backgrounds and bodytypes and seemed to have nothing in common. Yet the macabre presentation of their bodies hints at a connection. Martine is paired with a young detective, Julian Fletcher, and together they dig deep into the city's and the country's past, only to uncover a dark secret dating back to the 1950s, when orphanage...s in Montreal and elsewhere were converted to asylums in order to gain more funding. The children were subjected to horrific experiments such as lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and psychotropic medication, and many of them died in the process. The survivors were supposedly compensated for their trauma by the government and the cases seem to have been settled. So who is bearing a grudge now, and why did these four women have to die? Not until Martine finds herself imprisoned in the terrifying steam tunnels underneath the old asylum does she put the pieces together. And it is almost too late for her.."--

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MYSTERY/Debeauvo Jeannett
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1st Floor MYSTERY/Debeauvo Jeannett Due Aug 2, 2023
Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : Minotaur Books 2015.
Language
English
Main Author
Jeannette de Beauvoir (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
309 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781250045393
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

JOE COUGHLIN WAS just a wideeyed boy in "The Given Day," Dennis Lehane's epic novel about a family of Boston cops who prospered in the early 20th century, surviving poverty, prejudice, the Spanish flu pandemic and a crippling police strike. In "Live by Night," Joe returned as an alienated young hoodlum who rejected his father's harsh code of ethics, finding a surrogate in the mob boss who protected him in prison and groomed him to take over the family rackets in Florida, WORLD GONE BY (Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99) continues this sweeping fathers-and-sons tale by holding out the promise of redemption to Joe, while giving him a son of his own to love and betray. Lehane is such a master plotter, you needn't have read the previous novels to know exactly who Joe is and where he came from. It's a year after Pearl Harbor, and the crime bosses in Tampa have adapted to the war with the same skill and cunning they showed following the repeal of Prohibition. But after losing his wife and his empire in gang wars, Joe retired to serve as consigliere for his old friends in the Bartolo crime family, playing the diplomat with dictators like Fulgencio Batista of Cuba; more civilized businessmen like Montooth Dix, who runs the "Negro" rackets in Brown Town; and certifiable maniacs like King Lucius, who keeps a palace guard named the Androphagi, after a tribe of cannibals. Lucky Luciano calls King Lucius the Devil's "gatekeeper." Other mobsters think he's the Devil himself, although as Joe reasonably observes: "He's not the Devil. The Devil's charming." That kind of mordant wit entrances readers who want more from a crime novel than endless scenes of stomach-turning violence. Which, by the way, Lehane also delivers, in a tightly coiled narrative that pulls Joe back into the game when Theresa Del Frisco, a contract killer currently doing hard time, informs him that some unknown enemy has put out a hit on him. Plot, wit, violence, colorful characters - what more do you want from a genre novel? In Lehane's case, you also expect sympathetic insights into the existential agonies of a moral man working at an immoral profession in a corrupt world. Like his father before him, Joe tries to make restitution for his crimes. But as King Lucius (who's crazy, but not stupid) points out: "You think feeling bad about your sins makes you good. Some might find that kind of delusion contemptible." DONNA LEON'S FIRST love is opera. This American author not only does volunteer work for opera companies, she also set her debut novel, "Death at La Fenice," at that famed opera house in Venice, where she has lived for decades. So choosing Teatro La Fenice for the setting of FALLING IN LOVE (Atlantic Monthly, $26), her latest mystery featuring the erudite and oh-so-sympathetic Commissario Guido Brunetti, makes this elegant novel something of a mash note to a longtime lover. Italy's most celebrated soprano, Flavia Petrelli, a murder suspect in "Death at La Fenice," has returned to the opera house in "Tosca." The performance attended by the detective and his wife is a triumph, but the prima donna is unnerved by the cascade of yellow roses tossed onto the stage, another display of obsessive devotion from the anonymous fan who is showering her with gifts and soon begins attacking people close to her. The audacious investigation, conducted by Brunetti's confederate Signorina Elettra, into the psychology of stalkers is thorough and illuminating. But for opera buffs, going backstage at Teatro La Fenice is the real treat. WHAT A SAD tale Jeannette de Beauvoir tells in ASYLUM (Minotaur, $25.99), which opens in the 1950s with a scene of an unwed Canadian mother delivering her little girl to an orphanage run by tight-lipped nuns. "She's safe now," a kindly priest promises the woman. Readers' eyebrows shoot up when they come across such hollow assurances; as well they should, since the conditions of institutional life prove to be extremely harsh and very cruel. But the extent of that cruelty is not revealed until years later, when the luridly posed bodies of murdered women begin turning up all over Montreal. The panicked mayor delegates Martine LeDuc, his public relations director, to work with a young police detective on containing the damage before the tourist industry implodes, and they trace the current atrocities back to a time when medical experiments were performed on unwanted children warehoused in mental asylums. The author does a professional job of delivering the avenging angel, but the historical authenticity of the case makes it tough to take as fiction.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 5, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

There is a serial killer loose in Montreal, and the mayor asks Martine LeDuc, his director of PR, to act as liaison with the police department. Four women have been killed, their bodies left posed obscenely on park benches. When the police charge a homeless man with the murders, Martine is afraid the real killer is still at large. Luckily, renegade police detective Julian Fletcher is as convinced as Martine of the homeless man's innocence, and the two continue to investigate on their own. Martine uncovers a link between the four women: all were involved with the decades-old Duplessis orphanage scandal. Orphanages found they could get more money from the government if the orphans were mentally ill, so the children were sent to asylums, where many of them received lobotomies, electroshock treatments, and hallucinogens. The story alternates between the present-day investigation and the first-person story of one of the orphans, an approach that succeeds in giving the tragedy a human dimension. A complex and heartbreaking mystery.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Martine LeDuc, the publicity director for the city of Montreal and a wonderfully likable narrator, partners with offbeat police detective Julian Fletcher in this absorbing mystery from de Beauvoir (Murder Most Academic). As Martine and Julian look into the murders of four women found posed on park benches throughout the city over a period of months, they begin to suspect that the killings are linked to one of Montreal's most shameful scandals, the Duplessis Orphans. In the 1950s, children separated from mostly unwed mothers in the very Catholic province of Quebec were transferred from orphanages to mental hospitals as a means to secure greater funding. Inhabitants of these hellholes served as guinea pigs for experiments performed for pharmaceutical companies. Now someone is willing to kill in order to avoid opening old wounds. De Beauvoir does a fine job of evoking the ambiance of Montreal, with its fascinating neighborhoods, bilingualism, and political tensions. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An unlikely sleuth seeks to protect Montreal's cachet as a tourist destination by tracking down a killer whose handiwork is trashing the city's reputation.Martine LeDuc is nobody's idea of a detective. As directrice de publicit for Mayor Jean-Luc Boulanger, her job is public relations, not homicide investigation. But when a fourth woman is found reclining on one of the city's park benches, naked, raped and dead, Martine's boss calls on her to coordinate communications between Police Director Franois Desrocher and his own office because everyone else is too busy. Martine, faced with a particularly awkward situation because her deputy, Richard Rousseau, had been seeing research librarian Danielle Leroux, the most recent victim, partners with Dtective-lieutenant Julian Fletcher of the city police to track down the murderer. Even though the four victims were of different ages, social classes and walks of life, they all had a connection to the Cit de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Asylum, notorious in retrospect for its habit half a century earlier of taking in illegitimate children, denying them any education or vocational training, and forcing them to hard labor. The truth about the asylum, the unlikely sleuthing pair discover, is much grimmer than that. Considering that this isn't Martine's line of work, or even her hobby, her discoveries come with disconcerting ease and swiftness; she barely takes a wrong step until the villain takes her captive in a tunnel beneath the asylum and injects a cocktail of drugs into her, cackling all the while about what he's going to do if she's not rescued in time. An afterword by de Beauvoir roots the mystery in real-life events that sound just as depressing, though a good deal less improbable and melodramatic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.