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978-0-89587-290-6
0-89587-290-0
$22.95 hardcover
6 X 9
208 pages
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Gritz
Goldberg’s life is a mess. He is a middle-aged psychiatrist with an obsessive-compulsive
disorder and a foot fetish. He’s living in his hometown of Asheville,
North Carolina, where he was raised in the Jewish community, yet grew to
love barbecue and fried pork rinds. He lives with his ex-mother-in-law
and still lusts for an adolescent lost love. And whenever one of his
patients answers his questions with anger and mistruths, Gritz swears he
can smell Zelda Fitzgerald’s personal perfume—so what if Gritz’s
office was the same one used by Zelda’s therapist years ago; Zelda has
been dead for decades.
Just as Gritz begins to question his existence, he is called to the
Battery Park Hotel to convince a possible suicide not to jump off the
roof. He discovers that the suicide threat is merely a misunderstanding.
The man involved is “T” Simpson, who once worked for Gritz’s
family and “carried Gritz and his brother round town” for years
until he suddenly disappeared.
It turns out that T has returned to
right the wrongful conviction and execution of Mordecai Moore for the
murder of a New York co-ed in the Battery Park in 1939. T knows for sure
that Martin didn’t commit the murder, but he is tortured because the
racial climate of the times kept him from coming forward. But the spirit
of Martin is still present in the hotel and seems to guide Gritz as he
and an assortment of colorful characters unravel the mystery.
As he investigates, Gritz uncovers
dirty secrets that involve prominent people—people involved in a plot
to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt and aid the Nazi movement in
Germany in the 1930s. As his search for the truth proceeds, Gritz is
framed for the murder of an elderly woman who is living at the Happy
Valley Retirement Community. Then his quest expands into proving his own
innocence as well as Mordecai Moore’s.
Some of the characters are based on
actual historical figures. There really was a self-appointed commander
of a pro-Hitler militia who published propaganda out of Asheville in the
1930s. There was a conspiracy between major American companies and a
German munitions firm to monopolize materials needed in arms
manufacture, thus raising prices and funneling profits back to the
German war effort. There was a flamboyant senator from Asheville who was
one of the most eccentric politicians in American history. And of
course, Zelda Fitzgerald really did lose her life when the hospital
building in Asheville, where she was institutionalized, went up in
flames.
about the author
After selling a small chain of retail stores in western North Carolina,
David Schulman graduated from the University of Iowa and became a
full-time freelance writer. He won the North Carolina Press Club’s
Best Personal Columnist of the Year Award twice and is a frequent
contributor to Our State magazine. He lives in Asheville. This is his first novel. |
