Reviews for The Suicide Murders: A Benny Cooperman Mystery

The average rating for The Suicide Murders: A Benny Cooperman Mystery based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-07 00:00:00 Felipe Gonzalez What a thrill, when books are better than we think! I didn’t guess that Howard Engel is so funny! This is my favourite discovery. I saw a much later mystery, “The Memory Book”, 2005, on a charity table and decided: “It’s Canadian and it’s $1.00”. That set me on finding this début. Benny Cooperman is a private investigator in another wholly Canadian setting. I like Howard's hero more than Eric Wrights’: loveable, not a curser. He is a spry forty like me and interacting with his parents stirs up the greatest hilarity. I love Eric’s series but Charlie Salter is a disgruntled curmudgeon, ill-fitted to his family. Benny is friendly and fun: a low income guy taking his best, honest shot in his hometown. Except featuring modern Canada, he reminds me of Rex Stout’s Archie, without being smarmy. These are standard adult mysteries, neither ‘hardboiled’ nor ‘cozy’. Benny is intelligent, tough enough to push his way past obstacles, and genuinely cares about justice. A woman hires him to investigate her husband’s unexplained meetings. He dies after Benny trails him. This is an extraordinarily good mystery with origins in the past, clashing in confusion with several present day personages. It is exciting, emotional, the outcome is satisfying, and truly pulls you in. Howard’s writing is masterful! Astute without being fancy, yet I marvel at his succinct, creative observations of tiny things. They are conveyed in rapid asides that never detract from the flow of progress and conversation; likewise when sharing scenery and information. Benny’s parents are the pièce de résistance. Couch potato to the nth degree, his Mom habitually, rhetorically offers to serve a salad and ignores Benny’s fruitless acceptance! Enjoying Howard’s work so much makes me glad I own the sequel, “Ransom Game”. I will explore bookstores for the others!

Review # 2 was written on 2021-07-20 00:00:00 Raunlyn Marsette 4 Stars. What a great start for Benny Cooperman! Engel created Benny, a private eye, in 1980; there are thirteen novels in the set. He only does divorce work which most fictional PIs do their utmost to avoid. Grantham is a stand in for St. Catharines, Ontario, a small city located about 20k down the Queen Elizabeth Way from Niagara Falls. And ninety minutes from the big city of Toronto. Benny is trouble prone, always bumping into the police and not in a nice way. He's sarcastic and funny, with Jewish parents who moan about him living in a hotel and his prospects of more respectable work, and worry that he might be dating a shiksa. It all starts when a lovely woman visits Benny's office with a tale of woe. She thinks her husband Chester Yates, an important businessman, is having an affair. He's absent without cause every Thursday afternoon. Benny tracks him to the office of psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Zekerman and reports back to Myrna that she needn't be concerned about an affair. Then Chester shoots himself and it doesn't look like murder. After that, complications galore. I really enjoyed the difficulties Benny gets into. #2 is in my future for sure! (July 2021)