Bad, Bad Seymour Brown

by Susan Isaacs

Overview

New York Times bestselling author Susan Isaacs returns to a pair of her readers’ favorite characters, former FBI agent Corie Geller and her retired cop dad, who must solve one of the NYPD’s coldest homicide cases—before the crime’s sole survivor is killed.

When Corie Geller asked her parents to move from their apartment into the suburban McMansion she shares with her husband and teenage daughter, she assumed they'd fit right in with the placid life she’d opted for when she left the Joint Anti-terrorism Task Force of the FBI.

But then her retired NYPD detective father gets a call from good-natured and slightly nerdy film professor April Brown—one of the victims of a case he was never able to solve. When April was a five-year-old, she’d emerged unscathed from the arson that killed her parents. Now, two decades later, April is asking for help. Someone has made an attempt on her life. It takes only a nanosecond for Corie and her dad to say yes, and they jump into a full-fledged investigation.

If they don’t move fast, whoever attacked April is sure to strike again. But while her late father, Seymour Brown, was the go-to money launderer for the Russian mob – a mercurial and violent man with a penchant for Swiss watches and cheating on his wife – April Brown has no enemies. Well-liked by her students, admired by her colleagues, her only connection to crime is her passion for the noir movies of Hollywood’s golden age. Who would want her dead now? And who set that horrific fire, all those years ago?

The stakes have never been higher. Yet as Corie and her dad are realizing, they still live for the chase. Savvy and surprising, witty and gripping, Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is another standout hit from the beloved Susan Isaacs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802159069
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	28,472
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

SUSAN ISAACS is the author of thirteen novels, including Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs serves as chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and is a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into 30 languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband.

Hometown:

Sands Point, New York

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1943

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

Honorary Doctorate, Queens College

Website:

http://www.susanisaacs.com

Editorial Reviews

03/06/2023

Early in Isaacs’s winning second outing for Corie Geller (after 2019’s Takes One to Know One), the former FBI agent’s father, retired NYPD detective Daniel Schottland, reconnects with April Brown, whose parents died in an arson when she was five years old. Though Schottland and his colleagues never identified the arsonist, they assumed the target was April’s father, Seymour, who laundered money for the Russian mob. April—now a Rutgers University film professor obsessed with old movies—reports to Schottland that an SUV with obscured plates attempted to run her down on the school’s campus. Local authorities dismiss any connection to April’s childhood attack, but she remains unconvinced. Desperate for an escape from their “unremittingly suburban” routines and hoping to forestall another attempt on April’s life, Schottland and Corie set up an ad hoc PI office in the Gellers’s Long Island McMansion and start digging into Seymour’s sordid past. Offbeat characters, witty narration, and a winsome father-daughter dynamic complement Isaacs’s clever if madcap plot. Fans of breezy suspense will be delighted. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Susan Isaacs:

“I can think of no other novelist—popular or highbrow—who consistently celebrates female gutsiness, brains and sexuality. She’s Jane Austen with a schmear.” —NPR’s Fresh Air

“A witty, wry observer of contemporary life." —The Washington Post

“Nobody does smart, gutsy, funny, sexy women better than Susan Isaacs.” —The Washington Post

“The women who inhabit Isaacs’ books are smart, sexy, a little snarky, and filled with some serious chutzpah.” —Rachel Martin NPR’s Weekend Edition

“Ms. Isaacs is a witty author, but comedy gives way to terror as Corie’s inevitable confrontation with her dangerous quarry nears. All the foreshadowing and presaging pays off in spades, and the scenes that tie up loose ends are a pleasure to read.”—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

“What is it that makes Susan Isaacs’ books so delicious to read? She’s funny, for starters. And that humor combined with romance and old-fashioned murder mystery tickles every feel-good bone in our bodies. Her characters are whole and flawed and lovable, and you want only the best for them, even as you ardently wish to find them in danger — repeatedly — along the way.”—New York Newsday

“There are so many layers — and thrilling twists and turns — that you won’t want to put it down.”—InTouch

From the Publisher

2023-03-14
In this follow-up to Takes One To Know One (2019), an ex–FBI agent and her retired cop father team up again to solve a homicide cold case.

Still suffering PTSD symptoms from the last FBI case she consulted on, Corie Geller has settled into a quiet post-pandemic life on Long Island as an “underemployed suburban wife and mother” with her husband, daughter, and her Queens-based parents, who moved into the guest suite during the initial lockdown. But when Corie’s father, former NYPD detective Dan Schottland, is contacted by April Brown, the sole survivor of a two-decades-old unsolved arson that killed her parents, Corie gets pulled into helping him investigate a potential murder attempt on April—someone driving a dark SUV tried to run down the film studies professor on the Rutgers University campus. Was the attack related to the murders of Seymour Brown, a brutal man who laundered money for the Russian mob, and his wife, Kim? More than 40 years ago Isaacs burst onto the publishing scene with the bestselling Compromising Positions, a comic mystery mocking suburban mores. Unfortunately, she breaks no new ground here; her dull storyline is slowed down by the constant observational digressions of the characters. Everyone talks, talks, talks, and they don’t always stick to the point, as in the conversation about Seymour’s memorial service, which devolves into a comparison of funeral rites among different ethnic and religious groups, much to Dan’s (and the reader’s) annoyance. While true to life, this doesn’t make for stimulating reading. Likewise, Isaacs’ noted snarky humor now feels stale. The action only picks up in the book’s final third, and by then the reader doesn’t much care.

Only for die-hard Isaacs fans, who will get the title’s Jim Croce reference.

Kirkus Reviews