The Death Instinct (2010)

interesting take and spin on an actual happening. Foreshadowing Oklahoma and the two attacks on WTC? I enjoyed the characters in Interpretation of Murder and was happy to see them again. Although the narrative gets a bit complicated at times, the introduction of beautiful Colette Rousseau adds a tragi-romantic element. ( )

A promising premise: Wall Street reels from a bomb left in from the JP Morgan Bank in September 1902. After years of investigating, officials blame the crime on Italian terrorists but it is never solved and no one has been brought to trial (true story). Unfortunately, the author ties in Freud, Madame Currie and a tortured, unsympathetic, fictional doctor into his character mix.

Of course, the only female character to figure in the story is beautiful and significantly younger to the two male main characters. Of course, she is smart but her beauty is what leaves all men dazzled into abrupt proposals of matrimony among other things. And, of course, Freud is uber-insightful into all human emotions. (Huh? What does he have to do with the bomb on Wall Street?)

What this book did do was make me want to research the terrorist bombing in New York that took place nearly one hundred years before the World Trade Center attack to find out why I never heard about before. ( )

Excellent read. I haven't read anything by this author before and this book was a gift. Will definitely go in search of another. The characters are engaging and the storyline keeps you reading.

The more things change the more they stay the same. This novel deals with a bombing in New York--in 1920! There are themes with hatred of immigrants, PSTD following war & the use of attacks on our soil to initiate war against another country--I suppose it could be the present decade. Though I thought the there were interesting elements to this book--I felt there were too many plots to deal with in one book. At times the book just dragged. I had enjoyed Interpretation of a Murder so I was excited by this new book--somewhat of a disappointment! ( )

The 1920 bombing of Wall Street, the most deadly act of terrorism in the United States until the Oklahoma blast of 1995, provides the framework for Rubenfeld's excellent follow-up to The Interpretation of Murder. The sweeping plot details the baffling hunt for those responsible for the death and injury of more than 400 New Yorkers. Numerous intriguing subplots snake out from the main story line, several of which bring such historical figures as Marie Curie, famous for her radium experiments, and Sigmund Freud, who had a significant role in the previous book, to life. Rubenfeld deftly wends his way through the shifting landscape with a historian's factual touch and a storyteller's eye for the dramatic and telling. Readers will be enthralled as Dr. Stratham Younger, the hero of The Interpretation of Murder--aided by his beautiful fiancée, scientist Colette Rousseau, and Det. James Littlemore--manages to solve the Wall Street bombing, something that the real authorities never did.