Spotlight: The Two Birds by Hal Glatzer
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Teddie (nicknamed “Ducky”) and Herman (“Drakey”) are friends with benefits, but they aren’t spending much time, lately, billing and cooing. Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe; and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club. Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case; but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.
The spouses, who long ago gave up sex, are willing to tolerate the arrangement, as long as it doesn’t become public knowledge. But that’s a big risk, since Ducky and Drakey have flown into mysteries before [see below], uncovering murder and mayhem in Grand Lake City. Fortunately, police homicide detective Sarah Larson has, by the summer of 2019, come to accept their help and to help them in return.
The cold case revolves around an urban legend that somewhere in the city there is a warehouse of vintage motorcycles that were stolen from the factory—still in their shipping crates—back in 1948. Felix Long, an aspiring writer, brings this story to Herman, who is a retired magazine editor, hoping that, together, they can write a book about it. That would mean locating the con man Don Reynolds who, in 1986, claimed to have found those stolen bikes. He sold them, then ran off with the money, never having produced any bike but the one he drove around town.
Sylvia’s need for Herman’s help is more pressing. She chairs the local college’s School of Forestry and runs its research lab about 100 miles away in the mountains. The owners of the acreage just uphill from the lab are a 93-year-old man named Homer Gilley and a corporation called Harvest Gold, LLC. They are asking the state’s Department of Land Management to issue a logging permit. At a public hearing, Gilley says he wants to sell the timber to give a nest-egg to his daughter Agnes, who’s in her 70s. But logging would wreak havoc on the forest land around the lab.
To prioritize Sylvia’s dilemma, Herman sidelines Felix by introducing him to Irwin Duteriane, who has a local true-crime podcast; and to Shirley McKenzie, who writes a local true-crime blog. Each of them promises to help Felix, but after a week Irwin disappears; and two weeks later Shirley disappears too. So Herman feels he has to pick up the ball again.
Teddie is being whipsawed between the theater troupe’s more experienced leading ladies: Susie Warriner and Margo Boyd. Both are trying hard to be Teddie’s new best friend, even though each of them wanted—expected—to play Lady Macbeth herself, until Teddie came along. And her shoulder is giving her trouble, so she might not be able to compete in the tennis club’s upcoming tournament.
What seem like separate threads, however, are actually woven into a tapestry of deception, poison and murder. If Ducky and Drakey try to unravel it, they could zero out their benefits and—if they don’t watch their backs—wind up dead.
The Two Birds is the third mystery in the Friends With Benefits series, which includes The Nest and The Office Wife.
The Nest is a breezy present-day cozy mystery introducing Herman and Teddie: witty, affectionate sixty-somethings who are friends with benefits. When the landlord of their trysting apartment is found dead under their balcony, the police suspect them of his murder. So they set out to prove their innocence, in the process uncovering a trail of suspects, shady neighbors, and a corporate cover-up. Their sleuthing leads to dangerous discoveries, forcing them to risk exposure of their own secret affair while convincing a skeptical Detective Larson of the real truth.
In The Office Wife, Teddie’s husband George is arrested and charged with killing his closest colleague at work. Determined to clear his name, Teddie and Herman offer to help Detective Larson find the real killer. But George has issues with that. (If you were in trouble, would you accept help from your spouse’s lover?) Racing against time, they’re up against a tangled skein of suspects, including the victim’s co-workers and former lovers. To uncover the truth, Teddie and Herman are forced to bend the rules and put their affair on the line.
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About the Author
Although the Friends with Benefits series takes place in the modern age, much of Hal Glatzer’s mystery fiction has been set in the past. His Katy Green novels—Too Dead to Swing, A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen, and The Last Full Measure—are set in musical milieux in the years just before World War II. And his illustrated bildungsroman, Dead In His Tracks, chronicles the rise and fall of a family-owned streetcar line.
In the 1970s, Glatzer worked as a reporter and bureau chief for newspapers and TV news stations; but in 1978 he began to cover the emerging high-tech industries of Silicon Valley. He contributed to and/or edited several “computer magazines” for general readers, and had three non-fiction books published about computers and telecommunications.
He debuted as a mystery novelist in 1986 with The Trapdoor, about a hacker who gets in trouble with organized crime. He is a longtime member of Sisters In Crime; and of Mystery Writers of America, currently serving as vice-president of MWA’s New York chapter.
Glatzer also writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches, set authentically in the Victorian and Edwardian era, which have been published in U.K. and U.S. anthologies, and reprinted in his own anthology: The Sign of Five. He is active in several “scion societies.” And every year, he produces a Sherlock Holmes play in New York, performed in old-time-radio style.
When he is not working as an author, he’s working as a musician, playing guitar and singing the “Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.
There is more on his website: www.halglatzer.com
To contact him, please email info@halglatzer.com
