MURMURS OF INSANITY

“The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”—Allan Kaprow

Murmurs of Insanity—crossing the lines.

 

This fourth novel featuring Moriah Dru and Richard Lake dramatizes two separate cases. Running in the background is a case about a young would-be gang banger who witnesses a murder between drug lords and afterward disappears. In the second (primary) case Lake asks Dru to look into a missing art student at the University of Georgia. Lake is an Atlanta police detective and Moriah Dru is a private investigator specializing in tracing missing children.

Throughout my life I’ve had a keen interest in art—I’ve an easel somewhere in the attic to prove it. My interest extends to Performance art, too. Some think of it as avant-garde; and it certainly plays a role in anarchic art such as Futurism and Dada. Some see it as nihilistic, but all agree it’s a hop-step from genres like painting and sculpting. Kaprow, known as the father of “happenings”, was very clear that Performance art is not theater, but, to me, it certainly involves theatrics.

As action art, the artist or artists feel the need to challenge the conventions of traditional art and of society. Doctrine is tested. Brainwashed concepts mocked. In the case of the artists in Murmurs, the trail of Performance clues are meant to shake up a complacent community. What could go wrong?

I’ve tried to show in these divergent cases that societal insanity compels the thuggish and vile in the real world, while in the artist community of a college town, insanity shows up as contrived and annoying. Be that as it may seem, in the end Murmurs of Insanity is a murder mystery.

Oh, and about the cover—dolls give me the creeps. They look like the dead.

 

A Review:

This is an outstanding, complicated, complex, emotionally fraught, novel of murder, and manipulation. It requires careful and thoughtful attention to the details of the crimes, the motivations of the characters and the movement of the plot. The rewards for readers are substantial. Yes, character development and explication is important. Yes, the relationships among the main characters, and there are many, are vital, but, unlike many modern crime novels, in this story the plot is an important and sturdy factor. – Carl Brookins

 

Available online, in book stores and libraries. Ask your bookseller or librarian if it is not stocked yet.

Also in the Dru/Lake series:

The End Game

The Last Temptation

The Devil Laughed.

Running with Wild Blood – Jan. 2015

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Decatur Book Festival - a Southern city goes book crazy

Dear Readers, Fans and Fellow Writers,

I will be on an Atlanta Writers Club panel on Sunday, August 31 at 5 p.m. at the Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, GA., discussing my book MURMURS OF INSANITY. A moderator and three fellow panelists will also be discussing their latest releases and experiences in the writing life.

Please come visit us and have a wonderful experience connecting with us and other book nuts across the Southeast. After the program, at around 6 p.m., I (we) will be signing books.

I invite you to read a review by Carl Brookins, an excellent reviewer of all things book.

Murmurs of Insanity
A Moriah Dru / Richard Lake Mystery
Gerrie Ferris Finger
Five Star, July 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2858-5
Hardcover

This is an outstanding, complicated, complex, emotionally fraught, novel of murder, and manipulation. It requires careful and thoughtful attention to the details of the crimes, the motivations of the characters and the movement of the plot. The rewards for readers are substantial. Yes, character development and explication is important. Yes, the relationships among the main characters, and there are many, are vital, but, unlike many modern crime novels, in this story the plot is an important and sturdy factor.

Since pictographs were scratched into cave walls in the pre-modern era seven thousand years ago, art movements have been subjects for pity, scorn, adulation and ignorance. A modern phenomenon, performance art, plays an important part in this novel, which is set between Atlanta and Athens, Georgia. Some characters, Baxter, Moira Dru, Richard Lake among them, are the principal players. Each is a finely drawn, complex character whose motivations and background influence their attitudes and their actions. One of the interesting elements of the novel is the depth to which the author probes the decisions of the detectives and the way they are influenced by their training, experience and their personal backgrounds.

The other characters, some important to the development of the plot, are less well developed which might be a deficiency, but the pace of the story is at the least adequate and at times, exhilarating. The essence of the plot is the semi-automatic assumptions—several of them—made by police, family, and others about a series of circumstances. In this case, a missing student, tenuously linked to a wealthy restaurateur, is the original incident. The student’s girl friend is accusing the wealthy restaurateur who has a history of tangles with young women. Moira Dru, with aid from her lover, Atlanta detective Lake, drills down to get at the truth of the matter and discovers many surprises, some of which threaten Dru’s existence. A fine, thoughtful novel, well-written and packing plenty of action and surprise.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, June 2014.
Author of Red Sky, Devils Island, Hard Cheese, Reunion

 

Preview: MURMURS OF INSANITY -- 4th in the Nationally Award-Winning Series -- released July 16

Order online
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Murmurs of Insanity

 

A Moriah Dru/Richard Lake Mystery

  

by Gerrie Ferris Finger

 

Teen Johndro Phillips is missing after witnessing a drug deal turn to murder in his Atlanta nighborhood. Johndro is a spotter and runner for drug lord Devus Dontel “Big DD” McFersen, who was acquitted when Johndro couldn’t testify against himself.

Lake asks Dru to talk to his ex-wife, Linda. Seems her half-brother’s predilection for young women has gotten him mixed up with the student art community, two of whom go missing. Damian Hansel, his friend Arne Trammel and the mysterious Cho Martine devised a Conceptual Art Performance to shake up the tranquil community. Articles of Damian's turn up on nature trails, and, absent a body, the police think it's a treasure hunt scheme concocted by bored students. Dru thinks not.

From Five Star/Cengage

"The Home of Rising Stars in Today’s Fiction

Gerrie Ferris Finger is a retired journalist and author of several novels, three published in the Moriah Dru/Richard Lake series: The End Game, The Last Temptation and The Devil Laughed. Murmurs of Insanity is the third in the series published by Five Star. 

PRAISE FOR GERRIE FERRIS FINGER:

“A hunt for two young sisters propels Finger’s compelling if at times sobering debut, which

won the 2009 Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition . . . A wellresearched plot and snappy dialogue — plus some fine rail-yard K-9 detecting by Buddy, a German shepherd, and Jed, a Labrador retriever — keep the action moving."

— Publishers Weekly on The End Game

“When 12-year-old Kinley Whitney and her mother vanish in the midst of a contentious custody fight between her divorced parents, Judge Portia Devon appoints ex-cop Moriah Dru, who specializes in finding missing children, to locate Kinley. The mother, Eileen Cameron, has a history of drug problems, whereas the professor father, Bradley Whitney, has unexplained sources of wealth and ties to a mysterious men’s club in Atlanta.”

— Publishers Weekly on The Last Temptation"

Posted by Gerrie Ferris Finger
http://amzn.to/1qnIZf6

My Novels

THE GHOST SHIP -- Most highlighted

"'There is in life only one moment, and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight - and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.’” -- Mark Twain

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Gerrie Ferris Finger
WHISPERING
THE END GAME
THE LAST TEMPTATION
THE DEVIL LAUGHED
MURMURS OF INSANITY - July 2014