A Defense for the Dead [Paperback]

Charlestown native Jimmy Morrissey is an over weight, third-rate lawyer aged ?fifty plus tax? who was only recently involved in a check-kiting scheme with client funds. The walls of his life are closing in on him as he is freighted down with a beloved seriously ill wife, a secretary who wants him to help keep an abusive ex boyfriend at bay and an unexciting Boston practice he can barely keep afloat.
It is an unlikely scenario when his provincial world is upended by a visit from the F.B.I. who are wrapping up an investigation into the brutal serial killer named Van Gogh because of his penchant for cutting off the ears of the numerous victims he?s ritualistically murdered up and down the East Coast. When Van Gogh is shot to death in a Key West, Florida hotel room, he has, mysteriously propped up on the nearby table, a photograph of a beautiful young woman with the name and phone number of Jimmy Morrissey written on its back.
Unable to make any sense of this, Morrissey is driven to get to the bottom of the inexplicable connection. He is then plunged into a universe that seems far removed from his limited small time shabby existence as a self-described ?average nun-haunted Irishman.?
This is the hallmark of a Michael Fredrickson novel?marginal figures living lives on the edge of existence who are plunged into situations which are way out of their league and yet, somehow, with pluck, rise to the occasion because of their own innate decency.
A Defense for the Dead is the third novel of local lawyer, Fredrickson, who serves as counsel to the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers. Other trademarks of a Fredrickson novel are a prose style of such quality that it exceeds the legal novel genre and ascends into the realm of literature and ingeniously crafted plots that leave the reader chanting to himself all along the phrase an author would most like to hear, ??and then what happens??
Although the case is considered by the feds to be closed since the serial killer is dead, Jimmy Morrissey cannot leave well enough alone. His curiosity will not abide this. Through dogged gumshoeing, he tracks the origin of the photograph to Provincetown and there finds he has dived headfirst into a world of drag queen performers and gay lifestyles that is so foreign to him it is as if he has landed on the dark side of the moon.
But bit by bit, through intelligence and persistence, Morrissey begins to piece together another theory. This is that a particular murder in Provincetown, attributed to Van Gogh, is actually the work of a copycat killer. So, in a way, he is attempting to prove the dead Van Gogh innocent of, at least, this one murder. Hence, the title, A Defense for the Dead.
Despite the darkness of this thematic novel, there is such a deep wit running throughout that Fredrickson can come close to be described as a humorist. While following the trail of breadcrumbs toward its inevitable denouement, Morrissey relentlessly keeps up a running comic patter. To a smoker, he comments, ?there?s enough tar in that cough to resurface my driveway.? He refers to the effects of drinking as the ?wrath of the grapes.?
But, braced against the comic elements, there is an essential sadness here that brings to mind the old Irish adage that ?Nothing can stop the world from breaking your heart.?
It is always a curious practice in books, television and film how many fictitious average characters seem to have the time to take time off of work, investigate murders and succeed where the police could not. But, in Michael Fredrickson?s books, it underscores what is emerging as a continuing theme in his body of work?the down on his luck character of marginal competence who, through a resolve to find his own goodness, discovers the best part of himself and is able to be more than he thought he was.
This book affords an ultra-realistic glimpse into the occasionally seedy world of small time lawyering. The impressively elaborate plot moves quickly with such an unusual combination of humor and sadness that by its final page, you might be out of breath.

The media dubbed the serial killer Van Gogh because he dissected an ear from his victims. After murdering ten people, the FBI caught up with him and shot him to death.

Boston attorney Jimmy Morrissey feels like Job. His wife has cancer and his legal practice is collapsing as he finds his caseload boring. Though he feels things cannot get worse, they do as FBI agents visit to discuss with him why his name and address is on the back of the photograph of a beautiful woman found in Van Gogh's apartment. Jimmy has no idea why Van Gogh wrote his name on the back of the picture. Unable to resist, Jimmy begins investigating why him. However, the clues he begins to find makes him wonder if his melancholy is taking him over the edge because more and more he ponders if Van Gogh somehow is reaching from the grave to continue his murder spree and make him seem like the culprit. When Jimmy ignores his findings and tries to use cold logic to interpret the happenings, he wants to believe that a competent clever copycat killer targeted him to be his fall guy.

A DEFENSE FOR THE DEAD is an exciting psychological suspense serial killer thriller that will keep readers wondering if the plot is a horror tale or a copycat storyline. Fans will agree with Jimmy that there is no way Van Gogh could be doing what he seems to be accomplishing yet the evidence starting with his handwriting on the photo affirms otherwise. Michael Frederickson pulls off this sleight of the hand novel by keeping readers guessing as the suspense grows until the climax reveals all.

Harriet Klausner

This was a very well-written murder mystery - more educated-sounding than many (perhaps because the writer is a lawyer). All in all, I thought it was pretty fun, pretty exciting, with a little bit of a twist at the end. Honestly, it was the ambiguous ending coupled with its implausibility that ruined the book a bit for me. But I think I would still read another by him.