ISBN: 0-88739-251-2
272 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 8/2000
Paperback Original
Price: $14.95
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High Gate Health and Beauty
Joseph Colicchio
Joey Scadutto is enjoying his summer vacation from high school when he finds his neighbor's dog, Prince, strangled on Cobble Road. Then the owner is also found dead, and the people of High Gate, New Jersey, fear there's a murderer on the loose. When Joey starts to suspect that the killer is his own brother, and finds that an innocent girl is the number-one suspect, he must choose between family loyalty and doing the right thing.
Review: "This is a compelling first novel from New Jersey writer Joseph Colicchio....more than a whodunit. It is a pulsating portrait of family and neighborhood dynamics and their effects on a young man coming of age."
-Staff Reports, Oakland Tribune
"Colicchio's novel defies easy classification. It is a murder mystery and also a coming-of-age story, but more importantly it's a book in which character and place take precedence over plot or action."
-Elaine Foster, Multicultural Review
"What I loved about High Gate Health and Beauty, a contemporary version of Crime and Punishment, was its denseness, every paragraph promising to take the reader deeper. [It] has an almost magic realist sense of the marvel of the ordinary, a kind of grittily spiritual splendor."
-Mary Grimm, author of Stealing Time and Life to Themselves
"[This story] is a genuine one, eccentric and surprising and beautiful all at once. Colicchio writes of hardcore New Jerseyites, goodhearted and bad, and writes with love for them all, the best trait a writer can have."
-Bret Lott, author of Jewel and The Hunt Club
Bio: JOSEPH COLICCHIO lives in Cranford, NJ, and teaches at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City. As Told By Monk was his first published novel (October Press, 1981).
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