A Benjamin Justice Mystery Benjamin Justice knows a reporter is nothing without credibility. He learned the hard way when a Pulitzer was snatched from his grasp. It's been a long, hard climb to find even a fraction of the work he once had. But his fortunes are about to change: Justice has been offered the opportunity to script a documentary for public television. Only after he accepts the job does he learn a crucial piece of information: The man who had the assignment before him has disappeared, leaving behind his trashed motel room-and a spattering of blood. As Justice delves into his predecessor's notes and follows his tracks, he enters a world of pleasure and peril-and deadly secrets. And soon it will not be his reputation Justice must protect...but his very life. From the Edgar Award-winning author of Simple Justice "A startlingly complex and refreshingly sophisticated mystery...tackles real-life issues with just the right combination of urbanity and hard-boiled sleuthing." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Wilson handles the complex, ambitious plot with resonance and maturity." -- Kirkus Reviews A Benjamin Justice Mystery Benjamin Justice knows a reporter is nothing without credibility. He learned the hard way when a Pulitzer was snatched from his grasp. It's been a long, hard climb to find even a fraction of the work he once had. But his fortunes are about to change: Justice has been offered the opportunity to script a documentary for public television. Only after he accepts the job does he learn a crucial piece of information: The man who had the assignment before him has disappeared, leaving behind his trashed motel room-and a spattering of blood. As Justice delves into his predecessor's notes and follows his tracks, he enters a world of pleasure and peril-and deadly secrets. And soon it will not be his reputation Justice must protect...but his very life. From the Edgar Award-winning author of Simple Justice "A startlingly complex and refreshingly sophisticated mystery...tackles real-life issues with just the right combination of urbanity and hard-boiled sleuthing." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Wilson handles the complex, ambitious plot with resonance and maturity." -- Kirkus Reviews John Morgan Wilson's first Benjamin Justice mystery, Simple Justice , won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. The second, Revision of Justice , was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Wilson lives in West Hollywood, California, where he is now at work on the fourth Justice novel. From the Hardcover edition. I've heard that turning forty is the hardest passage for men. It's such a clear demarcation point in the average male life span--youth gone, middle age looming, physical powers and youthful passion waning, dreams unrealized and starting to feel dishearteningly elusive, while the reality and finality of death begin to insinuate themselves on the consciousness now that the years seem to pass so much more swiftly. Perhaps that's why so many men attempt such desperate transformations as they pass through their forties: dumping mates, leaving families, changing careers, consuming more and more alcohol to numb the fear, as the suffocation of routine and the shock of shattered illusions leave them trembling deep inside where we men keep our private truths so well hidden. My fortieth year was not like that. Most of my close friends were gone by then, having died suddenly or faded miserably away beginning in the early eighties, many of them well before their fortieth birthdays. This wholesale loss of friends, and the rapid succession of funerals and memorials that followed, is something men and women are supposed to experience piecemeal over several decades as they grow older, with enough healing time in between to allow for genuine grieving when the next death notice comes. Yet more and more in my world, it was the lucky survivors who buried the young, with numbing regularity, as in a long war. My landlords, Maurice and Fred, together now for almost five decades, were among those who attended selflessly to the dying and the dead. I stood dutifully if more aloofly beside them, saluting the fallen long after my tears were spent, until I lost Jacques, the one who mattered most to me, and the tears came back in a torrent, erupting from somewhere within me I previously had no knowledge of, with such wild force I was left shaken to my soul. My shameful reaction was to write a fictitious series of newspaper articles about a young man dying, cared for by his lover, but changing enough of the cold, harsh facts to create a warm fantasy I foolishly felt I might live with. I wrote with such desperate guilt that many people were moved by the articles, by their strange power, and a great prize was awarded to me that I was later forced to return when my pathetic act of fraud was exposed. After that, I shut myself away, hiding from the plag