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Book Review: A Splendid Death

Thunder Lake Press

Mark Rubinstein, a forensic psychiatrist, and best-selling author of both thrillers and medical nonfiction, knows his way around foreign blackjack tables, back alleys, and dangerous mountain roads, even though A Splendid Death, his new nail-biter, starts out in the working-class Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey and is told from the perspective of an innocent 21-year old protagonist. In fact, the tension-filled blackjack scenes, which take place in a secretive casino on the Costa Brava during Franco’s reign keep pages turning fast - not to mention that Rubinstein quickly explains how the card game works. Luck . . . and cunning.

The plot, involving a sophisticated con scheme by so-called good guys against violent, corrupt government officials – or is that last redundant? - unfolds slowly, but gathers in suspense and violence, and it’s not until the end that the title, “A Splendid Death” is realized. Though some narrative devices seem familiar in such thug-suffused stories where murder outguns mystery, Rubinstein manages to sustain anxiety about the fate of his two unusual main characters, brothers, Aron and Brett, who haven’t seen each other for some years.

Brett, seven years older and the golden boy of Aron’s youth, unbelievably smart, skilled, charming, a multitalented Adonis who turns heads when he walks by, has been abroad travelling all over. A Princeton graduate who could have his share of careers and women, he’s always heeded the siren call of adventure, though he dearly loves his younger brother and feels for him back in Newark, barely eking out a living and helping to support their elderly, sick Aunt Flora. Their parents were killed in a car crash three years earlier. They keep in slight touch.

And then on day in July, 1968 when the story begins, Brett surprisingly insists that Aron meet him in Spain. The promise is of a rendezvous in glorious surroundings. For Aron, hesitant and ordinary in comparison to Brett, the offer seems odd, but fond memories of his charismatic brother mentoring him, always knowing what to do and how to do it triumph. He goes tp Spain, but he can not fathom how Brett has so much money. The third-person narrative proceeds with Aron’s italicized passages, which is the reader’s point of view, imagining the worst,

Rubinstein’s prose is direct, nothing fancy, but spot on. The fictional town San Martin delights. As Brett points out to Aron, have you noticed-- no fast food chains, no garbage in the streets, a tourist mecca for wealthy Northern Europeans? So unlike Newark. But what San Martin does have becomes ominously clear: The Guardia, government soldiers, mercenaries, protected by Franco. Rubinstein doesn’t even give them names, they’re Red Beard, Military Guy, with their hands in every pocket and physical violence on their agenda. A sinister glance from one of them means trouble. Aron, naïve, guileless, soon gets that glance. He doesn’t understand their culture of viciousness and terror. And the mayhem begins.. . and goes on. It’s brutal but compelling.

In an endnote, the meticulous author points out slight changes he’s made -- creating a fiction or two “in the service of telling this story. After all,” he says, “the story is what counts,” he writes. He also points out that the story mentions a $1,000 bill and a $500 bill, large denominations most people would deny exist. But they did once, issued in 1861 recalled in 1969. Who says you don’t learn facts from even the most violent fiction.

Joan Baum is a recovering academic from the City University of New York, who spent 25 years teaching literature and writing. She covers all areas of cultural history but particularly enjoys books at the nexus of the humanities and the sciences.