Title: Death Claims (#2 in the Dave Brandstetter series) Author: Joseph Hansen Published by: Harper & Row, 1973 ISBN: [hardcover, 166 pages]
"My name is David Brandstetter. I'm a claims investigator for the Medallion Life Insurance Company." He handed her a card. She didn't glance at it. "I'm looking for Peter Oats," he said."He's not here. I wish he were. Maybe you can help me. The police don't seem to care."
She was April Stannard. She worked at Bancroft's, a bookstore in Hollywood. Her lover, John Oats, had been Peter's father. John had died, and April couldn't believe he'd died accidentally. She believed he'd been murdered.
David Brandstetter moves through the rare-bookstore world, to backstage at a community theater, to the home of a world-famous television performer, looking for an answer to April's problems, and to some of his own.
Joseph Hansen, a first-rate writer, believes in strong plotting, to keep people reading, and in this novel he not only has told an exciting, compelling story, but he has some serious things to say about how ruinous serious illness can be, about the drug world, and about the homosexual and his world.
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