The Cavanaugh Quest

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Format is approximately 6 inches by 8.5 inches. Signed by the author on the front free end paper. DJ has some wear and soiling and is price clipped. Thomas Eugene Gifford (May 16, 1937 - October 31, 2000) was a best-selling American author of thriller novels. He was a graduate of Harvard University. He gained international fame with the crime novel The Glendower Legacy and later with the Vatican thriller The Assassini. The books posited George Washington as a British spy and the Roman Catholic Church as a criminal organization. The Glendower Legacy was made into a movie in 1981 under the name Dirty Tricks. Gifford also published under the names Dana Clarins and Thomas Maxwell. The Cavanaugh Quest was nominated for an Edgar award. After Larry Blankenship calmly shot himself to death in his apartment building, the coroner's verdict seemed a formality; suicide. But investigative reporter Paul Cavanaugh has reason to believe the dead man was driven to that final desperate act. Cavanaugh's desire to prove his theory reopens scandals and secrets both of the past and present as he probes the lives of those close to Blankenship, especially that of the deadman's lovely ex-wife, Kim. In his obsessive pursuit of the truth, Cavanaugh finds himself irresistibly drawn to Kim's beauty and vulnerability, risking his single-minded purpose to her passionate appeal and unwittingly assuming the role of catalyst--as a number of people involved in the quest meet a sinister fate. Spinning a tantalizing web of intrigue, The Cavanaugh Quest is a gripping, cunningly plotted tale by a masterful storyteller. Backwoods treachery links a string of grisly Minnesota murders. Reporter Paul Cavanaugh is coming home from an afternoon tennis match when he sees an ambulance outside his building's door. A half hour earlier, the mild-mannered Larry Blankenship walked into the lobby, said hello to the doorman, and blew his brains out in front of the elevator bank, leaving behind a note apologizing for the mess. Cavanaugh retreats to his apartment to forget this disturbing scene, thinking the story is over when the police take away the body. But the suicide is only the beginning. A knot of death is tied tight around Blankenship's wife, Kim, an ice-cold beauty from the backwoods of northern Minnesota. As he investigates the string of deaths, Cavanaugh discovers a decades-old atrocity that may explain why the men who know Kim vanish faster than a sunny day in Minneapolis. Derived from a Kirkus review: The author tells a story within a story upon a story of some serial murders taking place in Minnesota through the eyes of writer Paul Cavanaugh who proves to be a soft mark for the ne plus attractive Kim Blankenship, after her husband dies by his own hand. That's just for starters. Kim seems to have left a long line of question marks and erasures in her tracks: what happened to a man called Dierker, more than ten years before, or the scrapbook of photographs of a small group of in-and-outdoorsmen who shared a lodge and one woman in the woods? Of course blood will tell, particularly bad blood, and this is a long history of mixed if not indeterminate paternity, incest, and what have you not. But it's all laminated with an easy narrative confidence well past its more restricted possibilities for blind conjecture or belief. A long, smooth effort.