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Price: $16.00
Binding: Trade paperback
Trim size: 5.06" x 7.81"
Pages: 206
ISBN-10: 1-932325-17-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-932325-17-1
December 2011

 Deadstick An Owen Keane Mystery
by Terence Faherty

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Owen Keane, failed seminarian, once hoped to find cosmic answers in human mysteries, but he's traded that quest for a nine-to-five job at a New York law firm and a quiet life. Quiet, that is, until a cryptic request for information on an accident that took the lives of a playboy aviator and his fiancée cracks the solid earth beneath Keane’s feet and pitches him once again into darkness and doubt.

The Mystery Company reintroduces Owen Keane beginning in December 2011 with this 20th anniversary edition of Deadstick, Terence Faherty's Edgar Award nominated first novel.  Deadstick will be followed by new editions of six other Keane novels that lead up to the publication of Keane’s new adventure, Eastward in Eden, in October 2012.

Marilyn Stasio reviewed the first edition of Deadstick in The New York Times Book Review (11/3/1991):

“My problem,” admits Owen Keane, “ [is] a mind that tends to wander dangerously without occupation.” Too flighty a mind for his pragmatic girlfriend, and much too unpredictable to suit the lawyer who employs him as a legal researcher, it’s a nice mind, nonetheless, for a metaphysical detective — the role that Keane plays in Terence Faherty’s intriguing first mystery, Deadstick.

Keane’s little brain cells warn him that something’s odd about his assignment to look into a plane crash that took the lives of a young banker and his fiancee 40 years ago....

Keane abandons his careful methods of library research for face-to-face interviews and field study, including an atmospheric trek through the treacherous New Jersey Pine Barrens, where the plane went down. As the moody hero suspected, the answer to the mystery is a sad one, but worth the pursuit for the existential lesson he takes from it — to keep searching for the tiny bits of mental order that keep at bay that “archenemy” of the thinking man, “the idea that the universe is godless and capricious, without pattern or meaning.”

No guns, no gore, but plenty of intellectual guts.

Terence Faherty is the author of two mystery series: the Shamus-winning Scott Elliott private eye series, set in the golden age of Hollywood, and the Edgar-nominated Owen Keane series, which follows the adventures of a failed seminarian turned metaphysical detective. His short fiction has won the Macavity Award and been nominated for the Anthony and the Derringer. An occasional lecturer on the films of Basil Rathbone, Faherty was recently admitted to the Baker Street Irregulars. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with his wife Jan.

Books by Terence Faherty:

The Scott Elliott Series

Kill Me Again (1996) - Available in a Mystery Company edition
Come Back Dead (1997)
Raise the Devil (2000)
In a Teapot (2005) - Available in a Mystery Company edition.
Dance in the Dark (2011)

The Owen Keane Series

Deadstick (1991)
Live to Regret (1992)
The Lost Keats (1993)
Die Dreaming (1994)
Prove the Nameless (1996)
The Ordained (1997)
Orion Rising (1999)

Short fiction

The Confessions of Owen Keane (2005)
The Hollywood Op: Private Eye Scott Elliott in Tinseltown (2011)

For more information, visit: www.terencefaherty.com