Lee Goldberg Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense

Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense

Lee Goldberg

Signet, August 2005, $6.99 344

ISBN 0451216148

In Los Angeles, rain has made the area a flood stricken mud hole and when Dr. Mark Sloan walks along the beach he is shocked to find a dead woman in a mermaid's costume near his home. When he goes to work at Community General Hospital, his friend and medical examiner Dr Amanda Bentley tells him that the victim was injected with a drug to induce paralysis and in her stomach was a memory card.

When they get it developed, it is a picture of a storm that happened in 1962 forty-three years ago in the same month. The killer is sending Mark a message because that storm began the events that led to Mark solving his first homicide. Five student nurses were killed because they were involved in a blackmail scheme headed by a doctor who was also murdered. The woman who was killed turns out to be the daughter of a patient he treated the night it all began in 1962. Mark is determined to find the killer who seems to enjoy taunting him even if it means putting his own life in danger.

Lee Goldberg is a very visual writer so each scene comes alive in the mind of the reader, almost as of this were actually watching an episode of the television show. The author is great at creating characters that are three dimensional and life like and he sets up the who-done-in such a way so that almost anyone could be the killer. Readers will thoroughly enjoy this very exciting and complicated mystery.

Harriet Klausner