Description
Midnight, July 18, 1969. A black Oldsmobile plunges over the side of a small bridge on an island off Martha's Vineyard. The young woman trapped inside the car drowns. Not ordinarily headline news, except that Senator Edward M. Kennedy claims to be the driver of that automobile.The world now knows the tragedy as the Chappaquiddick Incident. Senator Kennedy's public explanation was greeted with skepticism, and the mystery surrounding the accident baffled and intrigued many people. In this novel, a spellbinding blend of fact and fiction, P. Faulkner Trulimann is one of the more curious of the skeptics. Hier to a vast fortune and with time on his hands, Trulimann prepares a preliminary file of newspaper articles, photographs, and interviews with Chappaquiddick natives. He then convinces his old and dear friend, Charles Darby, a retired Scotland Yard inspector, to apply his acute deductive powers to the problem and form an opinion of what really happened that July night.
What the Inspector has to go on is indeed sketchy. The transcripts of the closed-door Massachusetts inquest were not made public until months after the accident. But when the transcripts are finally released, Darby, Trulimann, and his young assistant Priscilla decide to test the Inspector's startling conclusion. They restage the inquest using selected friends to play the roles of the actual witnesses. As the players recite the authentic verbatim transcripts, the Inspector guides them through the intricate process by which he formed his opinion, pointing out the inconsistencies, the minute time differences, the loose ends, and the questions that were never asked.
The Inspector's Opinion is a rare sort of novel. Its basis is an enigmatic and complex historical event, yet its characters in search of a solution are fictional sleuths. Its conclusion is only a theory, but a theory that is totally believable, totally intriguing, and totally at odds with what we were told happened at Chappaquiddick.
MALCOLM REYBOLD is a former advertising executive. He lives in New York City. ISBN:9780841503991
