The Sixth Commandment by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"You are as old as you feel? Bullshit. You're as old as you look. And you can't fake youth, not really. The pain is in seeing it go, grabbing, trying to hold it back. No way. Therefore, do not send to ask for whom the ass sinks; it sinks for thee."

With Lawrence Sanders one gets some winners, like the wonderful McNally series, for instance, McNally's Risk , and some stinkers, like the unbelievably bad Private Pleasures . The Sixth Commandment (1979) comes somewhere in between, fortunately a bit closer to the better side of Mr. Sanders (or whoever wrote his books; I really do suspect that he used to hire ghostwriters to produce the stinkers).

Samuel Todd works as a field investigator for the Bingham Foundation that gives away about 10 million dollars a year for scientific research. Mr. Todd is tasked to investigate Dr. Thorndecker, a Nobel Prize winner and an expert in the biology of aging, who has requested a substantial grant to study the effects of electromagnetic waves on human embryo cells in vitro. It is clear from the beginning that the case is anything but straightforward: as soon as Todd arrives in the town where the scientist lives, he receives a note that says "Thorndecker kills." Not only is the good Doctor the owner of a research lab but also he owns a nursing home that caters to rich patients. Todd suspects that the connections between the two institutions have been understated in the grant application.

From the beginning of the investigation the author is trying to convey to us Todd's sense of dread about what might be going on. "It's worse than you think!" says one of the characters. Yet Mr. Sanders is more successful in producing some nice prose (evident in his later, McNally novels). Here's a cool passage that refers to John Donne's famous poem:

"So I knew that if I did not do something, Europe would be the less."

He also manages to evoke some lyricism in his prose:

"It was a metallic mesh, wrapped around the physical world. [...] Beyond, even dimmer, the bare trunks of trees appeared, disappeared, appeared again, wavery in the hazy light."

There is even a smattering of social observations to accompany the plot: Dr. Thorndecker's little town, deserted by most young people, is "a village that was a necropolis of fractured dreams."

Far below the level of McNally series yet a readable, moderately interesting story, with a rather predictable ending.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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