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Cory Goodwin #2
Another Number for the Road
They met at an antiwar march in D.C. He played lead guitar for The Rind, Boston's top rock-protest band. She was a journalism major at Mount Holyoke College. Their interview in Phases launched her career.
The Rind spiraled from stardom into chaos. Vocalist Mickey Ascher's welcome-back party from rehab ended with a 9-1-1 call. The police found his battered, champagne-drenched corpse sprawled across his penthouse rug. Dan Quasi was grilled for months, then disappeared. Cory Goodwin honed the investigative skills she'd learned from her father, New York detective Archie Goodwin, and landed a summer assignment in Paris. A whirlwind romance with a fellow writer swept her off her feet into a gala wedding back home in Boston.
Now Unsolved Mysteries is reopening the Ascher case. Cory's marriage is spiraling toward chaos. According to Phases, Dan Quasi plans to launch his long-awaited comeback with a goodwill exchange program to Paris. Why would a rock-&-roll legend debut his new band at the Eiffel Tower, a Seine cruise, and EuroDisney for an audience of upscale Bostonians? With misgivings, Cory agrees to cover this musical mystery tour as a way to search for her own lost time.
But in France, Hands Across the Sea's nostalgia trip becomes a battle between past and present. As drugs, sex, and long-buried grudges start exploding around Quasi & Company like land mines, Cory has to confront her father's elephant-in-the-room question: Who killed Mickey Ascher?
The Rind spiraled from stardom into chaos. Vocalist Mickey Ascher's welcome-back party from rehab ended with a 9-1-1 call. The police found his battered, champagne-drenched corpse sprawled across his penthouse rug. Dan Quasi was grilled for months, then disappeared. Cory Goodwin honed the investigative skills she'd learned from her father, New York detective Archie Goodwin, and landed a summer assignment in Paris. A whirlwind romance with a fellow writer swept her off her feet into a gala wedding back home in Boston.
Now Unsolved Mysteries is reopening the Ascher case. Cory's marriage is spiraling toward chaos. According to Phases, Dan Quasi plans to launch his long-awaited comeback with a goodwill exchange program to Paris. Why would a rock-&-roll legend debut his new band at the Eiffel Tower, a Seine cruise, and EuroDisney for an audience of upscale Bostonians? With misgivings, Cory agrees to cover this musical mystery tour as a way to search for her own lost time.
But in France, Hands Across the Sea's nostalgia trip becomes a battle between past and present. As drugs, sex, and long-buried grudges start exploding around Quasi & Company like land mines, Cory has to confront her father's elephant-in-the-room question: Who killed Mickey Ascher?
- GenresFiction
379 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2017
3 people are currently reading
12 people want to read
About the author
C.J. Verburg
18 books11 followersSan Francisco writer Carol (CJ) Verburg is an award-winning playwright, theater director, and author of best-selling books, including the international literature collections Ourselves Among Others and Making Contact.
Carol started her literary career before age one, telling stories to a rapt audience of stuffed animals. In her early teens she wrote her first novel and won her first playwriting award. At Mount Holyoke College she wrote the book and lyrics for the first rock musical, We Could Save the World. Since then she's worked as a cocktail waitress, newspaper proofreader, part-time boat-builder, and (for decades) an in-house and freelance trade and textbook editor and author in Boston and San Francisco.
Her Cory Goodwin mystery series includes Silent Night Violent Night, an hommage to the noir side of publishing, and Another Number for the Road, the first multimedia literary rock-&-roll novel.
For many years she ran theater companies on Cape Cod and lived up the road from the artist and author Edward Gorey. They became close friends and frequent collaborators, a symbiosis which inspired her lavishly illustrated 2024 artist's biography The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories, as well as her short multimedia ebook Edward Gorey On Stage, and her Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod mystery series: Croaked, Zapped, and Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma (plus a couple of stories).
Carol started her literary career before age one, telling stories to a rapt audience of stuffed animals. In her early teens she wrote her first novel and won her first playwriting award. At Mount Holyoke College she wrote the book and lyrics for the first rock musical, We Could Save the World. Since then she's worked as a cocktail waitress, newspaper proofreader, part-time boat-builder, and (for decades) an in-house and freelance trade and textbook editor and author in Boston and San Francisco.
Her Cory Goodwin mystery series includes Silent Night Violent Night, an hommage to the noir side of publishing, and Another Number for the Road, the first multimedia literary rock-&-roll novel.
For many years she ran theater companies on Cape Cod and lived up the road from the artist and author Edward Gorey. They became close friends and frequent collaborators, a symbiosis which inspired her lavishly illustrated 2024 artist's biography The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories, as well as her short multimedia ebook Edward Gorey On Stage, and her Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod mystery series: Croaked, Zapped, and Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma (plus a couple of stories).
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 5, 2017
A fun great read. The author sets the atmosphere perfectly, the characters feel real, and the story progresses a pleasurable pace. Many a time, I felt I was reading a rock and roll memoir or Rolling Stone piece, which simply pulled me further into the story. The author has also cleverly found a way for the reader to actually listen to the fictional band's music! If you like music and enjoy a mystery, seek out this book!
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April 23, 2022This is actually the second outing for Cory (Cordelia) Goodwin, Boston journalist and daughter of Archie Goodwin, but I don't remember any details from the first, Silent Night, Violent Night, that would be relevant here. This time she's mostly in Paris, with much interesting local detail, covering a tour by a reconstituted rock band to which she was devoted as a college student. The murder of the band's leader twenty years ago was never solved, and the conflicts that led to it are still causing problems in the present. While I enjoyed what felt like insider information about the lives of touring rock musicians, including vivid evocations of the effects on both performers and audience when the music comes together, they do tend to make the book longer than it needs to be for development of characters and plot. Still, I'll be interested to see where Cory goes next.
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July 22, 2017CJ Verburg's Another Number for the Road has all you could ever want from a murder mystery set in two iconic periods of American history: the 1960s: Free Speech, Free Love, Stop the War, Civil Rights and sex, drugs, rock and roll; and 1980s: Reaganomics, Cold War Collapse, Punk Rock, big hair and bigger shoulders.
Rock journo cum detective, Cory Goodwin (who has as many names as identities) goes on a “Magical Mystery Tour,” and then some, to recover her true inner self which has been consumed and subsumed by the demands of her multimillionaire son-of-the-founder-of-a-cosmetics-conglomerate husband’s boardroom betrayal of all they meant to each other as writing romantics who eloped in creative Paris and crashed in corporate necessity in Boston.
Cordelia Goodwin Thorne had many years of protest activism and rock star groupie antics to keep her from sinking into the paradox of her journo daydreams and her cosmetic charity dinner reality.
She joins the “Magical Mystery Tour” when she learns that The Rind is the mystery band—a group she interviewed for a magazine as a teenager. She aims to rekindle her past admiration for the much-maligned strongman of the band, the appropriately named, Dan Quasi, who, after the brutal murder of his friend and co-band member, Mickey Ascher, takes a runner and hides out for the twenty year hiatus, having lost his wife and his French bit to aforementioned co-band member.
Did this Quasi musician kill his best friend? Or was it the French bit? Or possibly her jilted lover and third band member, also appropriately named, Roach? Or has the mild-mannered Terry, fourth band member, been hiding a violent temper all these years?
The process of discovery is further energized by the author’s experience as a playwright and director. CJ Verburg makes use of the theatrical technique of juxtaposing two scenes on stage at once: flashbacks, backstory, supposition and real time, one upon the other, while skillfully juggling a cast of characters that would daunt Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffiths.
Another Number for the Road will satisfy all fans of complex, convoluted whodunits who remember the Sixties with longing and survived the Eighties, Nineties and are in deep with the Twentieth Century.
Rock journo cum detective, Cory Goodwin (who has as many names as identities) goes on a “Magical Mystery Tour,” and then some, to recover her true inner self which has been consumed and subsumed by the demands of her multimillionaire son-of-the-founder-of-a-cosmetics-conglomerate husband’s boardroom betrayal of all they meant to each other as writing romantics who eloped in creative Paris and crashed in corporate necessity in Boston.
Cordelia Goodwin Thorne had many years of protest activism and rock star groupie antics to keep her from sinking into the paradox of her journo daydreams and her cosmetic charity dinner reality.
She joins the “Magical Mystery Tour” when she learns that The Rind is the mystery band—a group she interviewed for a magazine as a teenager. She aims to rekindle her past admiration for the much-maligned strongman of the band, the appropriately named, Dan Quasi, who, after the brutal murder of his friend and co-band member, Mickey Ascher, takes a runner and hides out for the twenty year hiatus, having lost his wife and his French bit to aforementioned co-band member.
Did this Quasi musician kill his best friend? Or was it the French bit? Or possibly her jilted lover and third band member, also appropriately named, Roach? Or has the mild-mannered Terry, fourth band member, been hiding a violent temper all these years?
The process of discovery is further energized by the author’s experience as a playwright and director. CJ Verburg makes use of the theatrical technique of juxtaposing two scenes on stage at once: flashbacks, backstory, supposition and real time, one upon the other, while skillfully juggling a cast of characters that would daunt Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffiths.
Another Number for the Road will satisfy all fans of complex, convoluted whodunits who remember the Sixties with longing and survived the Eighties, Nineties and are in deep with the Twentieth Century.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews