The story of Michael, a professor of Comparative Literature who is beginning to suspect that his wife, Christine, an ex-student some 20 years his junior, is harboring dark secrets about her past.To uncover these secrets, he teams up with Christine's psychologist, and the two use deception to find out about her mysterious past, which is personified by her even more mysterious father, whose ghost-like presence is felt throughout the novel. In the climactic scene of Lovers Living, Lovers Dead, Michael raids his wife's secret hope chest, finding out that Christine's "wild stories" about her father's trips to Africa and the Far East, where he consorted with "witch doctors" and tribal chieftains, were not tales after all, but realities. He finds millions in Swiss bank accounts, and pornographic pictures of his wife being molested as a child (so that she could not be sacrificed as a virgin). As it turns out, Christine's father struck a deal with the devil as it were, one in which he delivered his daughter's soul in order to save her from becoming a human sacrifice.

Lovers living, lovers dead

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Lortz, Richard

Thrillers & Suspense

PUTNAM

Drama Characters: 2 male, 3 female. One Set This play was produced professionally in New York and London, as well as on television. A young couple arrive at an old house just before a snowstorm isolates them. Since her child's death, the wife has been in a sanitarium and the guilt and tensions of the young couple's tragic loss have all but destroyed their relationship. They try to rebuild their mutual trust, but the wife hears voices and she and the audience see the pale figure of a girl. The husband sees nothing. As the snow and night falls, the voices of a happy family playing joyfully grow louder and more insistent until the dramatic climax in this stunning play.

Voices (Lortz)

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Concord Theatricals

"Mother Who Lost Son Seeks Son Who Has Lost Mother," read the advertisement in The Village Voice.Those who replied, the curious, the disturbed, the opportunistic were writing to Mrs. Harrington-Smith Evans, one of the ten wealthiest women in the world whose only child, a teenage boy, had died a mysterious death.Pretentious, theatrical, wantonly self-dramatized, increasingly deranged in her grief, Mrs. Evans indulges in all the extravagant expressions of bereavement that money can buy: a seamless glass coffin; an embalming secret the pharaohs of ancient Egypt must have dreamed of; and a tomb so costly and exquisite, Shan Jahan's ghost surely groaned in its envy.Finally, the ad: in retrospect so silly and embarrassing she needn't kill herself to die. But if she found him, a surrogate son might ease her grief, forestall her encroaching madness.From the many respondents, her choice narrows down to three: Angel, an illiterate boy from New York's Spanish ghetto; Martin, a handsome, fatally ambitious young actor; and disarming Bruno, barely eighteen, an aspiring novelist who writes her perfumed letters in an absurd 19th century prose.The Rivalries, the passions, the bizarre events that follow this strange entourage include murder, suicide, and a "haunting" like no other in this world or the next.As he did in Lovers Living Lovers Dead, the author, tongue-in-cheek, mixes "comedy and ancient terror" in a lyrically layered style that critics call "a frightening lightness of tone...as eerie as the plot itself." But Bereavements also has its serious side. As its final pages chill us with the supernatural-as-metaphor, it is clear we are nearing the end of an extraordinary love story: one not eros but agapeone that distinguishes movingly between a love that is love, and a love that is Love.

Bereavements

Self-Help

Death & Grief

Franklin Watts

Jason Kole, an orthodox Jewish student living in Brooklyn in 1969, comes to terms with his heritage

Damaged Goods

Friedmann, Thomas

Children's Books

Permanent Press

Lovers Living, Lovers Dead.

United States

Lovers Living, Lovers Dead

Knightsbridge Publishing

Science Fiction & Fantasy

White Wolf Publishing

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Books by Lortz, Richard