A Lethal Question by Mark Rubinstein

Meet Dr. Bil Madrian . . . Manhattan-based psychiatrist . . . two years past the sudden death of his fiancé from a brain aneurysm . . . lives alone and retains everything that belonged to her . . .has a married sister (hubby is a criminal defense attorney) with 2 daughters and a nosy, widowed mother . . . a peaceful, if empty, and unpretentious life . . . has a new patient who he has seen just a few times . . . Alex Bronzi.

Alex is early 20s, still lives with his parents and thinks he should be allowed a bigger role in the family business (drugs, money laundering, trafficking). Dad thinks otherwise. Alex sought counseling to help with his relationship with his father. Alex is Albanian-American, immature, and a bit of a braggart in his attempts to boost his standing with others. During his most recent session. Alex blurts out a question: “Hey Doc. You wanna know who clipped Boris Levenko?”

Levenko was a Ukrainian mob boss in the Brighton Beach area. He and two associates were gunned down in a restaurant earlier in the week. Madrian is bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, of course but the Levenko hit was a broad daylight execution. If the killers aren’t found, this could be the start of another mob war. Should Madrian tell the cops or FBI? More importantly, is Alex going to blab that he’s been seeing a shrink, that he posed that loaded question to the doc?

Figuring that Alex won’t keep his mouth shut, Madrian’s imagination starts to run wild. Is he next to be silenced? How does an amateur keep from being tracked down in Manhattan? What about his family and nieces? His patients? Does he stay in his apartment? He knows enough to know that a digital footprint follows everyone. He does have a racquetball friend whom he has never contacted by email, text, or cell phone. Luck is on his side as this friend and wife are vacationing in the Caribbean and generously offers his brownstone. Get the key from a tenant who lives in the basement apartment, a late 20s librarian named Elena.

Given that he’s now been dumped into a criminal case, he quietly asks his brother-in-law for advice - he’s dealt with the underworld. Surely he’ll have some suggestion. His firm has used what might be called a fixer, guy who goes by the name of Rami. Madrian is told that once he contacts Rami, his immediate future is in Rami’s hands and must do everything Rami says exactly as Rami describes. Get multiple burner phones, absolutely stay off the internet, cancel patient appointments, no contact with family. Stay in that brownstone. Let Rami do what he does and he'll get his life back.

Madrian gets the key from Elena. Big mistake: he eventually tells her why he’s upstairs. They venture out to lay in some food and Bill thinks he notices someone might be following him. Over the next couple days, they stick close in her flat and (as you might guess) start to get close. Meanwhile, the Albanians are getting closer, and he still hasn’t heard from Rami.

Think of this book as a cross between The Sopranos (a mobster seeing a shrink) and Three Days of the Condor (the Robert Redford movie where he’s on run from a hired hitman and takes up with a photographer to hide at her place). The story is told almost entirely from Bill Madrian’s perspective where Rubinstein delivers generous doses of suspicion, paranoia, fear, lunacy, madness, depression, and impending insanity descending on Bill. Rubinstein presents  a fast based cat-and-mouse chase in and around NYC. Kept me riveted to my couch and I’m sure you will be too.

Rubinstein, a psychiatrist to boot, is a much-published author of fiction and non-fiction. He has 8 fiction books, mostly featuring physicians/lawyers (but I’d not call any a ‘legal thriller’), all published by Oceanview. You’ll find quite several Oceanview books (Rubinstein included) reviewed by the boys here at MRB and I’d be hard pressed to say any weren’t solid winners. Oceanview knows how to pick its authors.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance reviewer copy. Anticipated publication date is 7 May 2024.

 

East Coast Don

 

 

Sopranos + 6 Days of the Condor

Assassin's Lullaby by Mark Rubinstein

Mark Rubinstein is one of my colleagues although we’ve never known one another. We’re both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but he’s a real thriller writer and I’m only a wanna be novelist. His work has been highly praised by the best writers in the thriller murder mystery genre. However, I’m beginning to think that I’ve read too many murder mysteries., certainly more than one thousand of them. I found myself reading Assassin’s Lullaby and not being particularly impressed. 

 

It seemed like an old story of an assassin, originally trained by the Mossad (sounds like Gabriel Allon in the Daniel Silva books), who is growing older (now 39) and is questioning the choices he's made in his life. It’s a kill or be killed existence, but how does he get out of the life. The author describes a hit man who has no presence in the data world. No one knows what he looks like or where he is from. He’s a language master and speaks multiple languages fluently and without accent. He makes his contracts through a dark web site, and he only deals with his clients by that means. Also, Rubenstein repeatedly makes the point that his protagonist, Eli Dagan, has already accumulated money to live comfortably for the rest of his life, so he really does not need to take another job. But, inexplicably, he does so. Yet, he denies being attracted by the financial arrangements which provide him with his highest fees ever. Then, inexplicably, he suddenly agrees to break his anonymity by meeting face-to-face with a mob boss that wants him to kill another mob boss, although Dagan is required to make it look like a natural death, not an assassination.

 

Dagan gets entangled with a woman of remarkable beauty. In his lust for her and for a new life, he seems to shut down all of his usual wariness of such relationships, a decision which nearly leads to his death. While I’m interested in reading more of Rubensteins works, especially Beyond Bedlam’s Door, I cannot give Assassins Lullaby a great recommendation.

 

WCD