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It was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One night during his usual visit to chat with old people at a hospice, Paul Mulchrone is attacked by a dying man who thinks Paul is someone else. Paul ends up with a stab wound in his shoulder, and a heart attack finishes off the old man. Within hours, Paul (and the nurse who had encouraged him to see this patient) is being hunted by some seriously bad guys. But he doesn’t know exactly who they are, or why he is being targeted. The old man just said some stuff that made no sense.
Brigit and Paul learn soon enough that they can’t trust the police; someone on the force shared the news about the real identity of the dead man. He was one of three men who had kidnapped a wealthy young bride a few decades earlier. She, and two of the kidnappers, were never heard from again. The story went that the newly dead man had died at the time of the disappearance, and the bride took off with one of the kidnappers. It had even become a popular book.
Paul would be fine with taking off entirely and making a new life somewhere just to be safe. Brigit, though, insists they need to figure out the mystery of what’s happening. And so they do. They face all kinds of danger and fresh attacks (Paul in particular boasts a number of wounds on his body within just a day or two’s time). And by the very end of this book, they find out the truth.
I read A Man with One of Those Faces because it was on a list online of books that made people laugh out loud (though not all were murder mysteries!). I had enjoyed a few other books on the list so I figured I’d try this one. It did have a couple of pretty funny spots, but it was not nearly as laugh-out-loud as I’d anticipated. Plus, it was fairly rough and violent. No more from that list.
Rated: High. Profanity includes about 60 uses of strong language, about 100 instances of moderate profanity, 60 uses of mild language, and about 90 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are also about 25 instances of the British bl- curse word. Sexual content includes references to sex and one scene where characters kiss and start to move toward having sex but stop. There are a good number of crude references. There are a couple of scenes with nude characters. Violence includes stabbings, shootings, fights, and other attacks, some of which lead to death and others to injury.
