Memory Book: A Benny Cooperman Detective Novel - Softcover

Left for dead in a dumpster, private investigator Benny Cooperman becomes his own client in his most puzzling mystery yet. Benny is recovering in a Toronto hospital from a serious blow to the head. He has a condition called alexia sine agraphia; in layman's terms, it means he can still write but cannot read. And his memory has been affected too: Although he can quote lines from his high-school production of Twelfth Night, he finds himself brushing his teeth with his shaving cream. Even his girlfriend's name—Anna Abraham—continues to elude him. When Benny learns that he was found unconscious beside a dead woman, he figures he must have been close to solving a case. With Anna working as field agent and two Toronto cops reluctantly sharing their discoveries, Benny pieces together the events that led to a murder—and his own injuries.

Howard Engel was a producer for the CBC for many years. THE COOPERMAN VARIATIONS was his tenth Benny Cooperman novel. He has also written MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE and MR. DOYLE AND DR. BELL, a Sherlockian delight. A founding member of the Crime Writers of Canada, Howard Engel won the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and the 1984 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. He has received the prestigious Matt Cohen Award in celebration of a Writing Life. He was recently the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor in Canadian Culture at the University of Toronto. After suffering a stroke, Engel was diagnosed with alexia sine agraphia, or "pure word blindness," which is an interruption of signals between the parts of the brain that receive visual data from the eye and those that decipher language.