Instinct of Death

New York, 1920. World War I has just ended, and the unrest of the 1920s has not yet begun. Factories are closing, families are losing their homes. Unemployed men are forbidden to drink under the new Prohibition law. On the streets of Manhattan, protest and unspoken passions against the situation in the country are felt. At this moment, Wall Street explodes. It is the most destructive and deadly terrorist attack carried out on US soil up to that time.

“Instinct of Death” begins on a September day, when a powerful explosion occurred in Lower Manhattan, and Americans began to wonder who were those who hated them so much. That day the word “terrorist” became part of the American vocabulary, and the people prepared for war. Caught in the whirlwind of these events are war veteran Stratham Younger, detective Jimmy Littlemore and the enigmatic beauty Colette Russo. A mysterious chain of facts, together with a series of unexplained attacks on Colette and her deeply buried past, accompanies this trio on a journey as exhausting as it is interesting: from Paris to Prague, from the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the world to the most secret underground vaults of the US Treasury, from the laboratory of Marie Curie at the Radium Institute in France, where she tried to use radium to cure cancer patients, to the factory where radium was killing people, from Sigmund Freud's house in Vienna to the halls of Congress in Washington DC, through the corridors of power buildings in Washington DC, and, in the end, to the secret depths of our most savage instincts. As the frightening, seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle begin to come together, Younger and Littlemore uncover Colette's secret and the shocking truth of the terrorist act on Wall Street.

Set against the backdrop of the devastating bombing of Wall Street in September 1920, a real historical event that remains unsolved to this day, “Instinct of Death” skillfully links fact with fiction, murder with passion, anxiety with adventure, in a story that speaks of the deepest secrets of our most primitive instincts.

The author takes this historical event and tries to provide answers to all the questions and mysteries surrounding it, but, unlike many other writers, he trusts the reader and leaves room for their imagination to draw their own conclusions.

“There are different ways to deal with the terror of death,” he writes. “To deny it, to live in anxiety, or to accept it. But there is also a fourth way, which requires not forgetting, not lying to yourself, and not groveling at the altar of the inevitable. Everything comes down to instinct.”

Rubenfeld's novel keeps you on edge with a combination of action-packed scenes, including kidnappings, knife and gun fights, poisonings, bank robberies, corruption, intrigue, politics, love, adventure, psychology and psychoanalysis, and more. A steady thread of intrigue and confusion runs through the novel, and its ending, the reader would never have imagined. The novel grips you with the variety and symbolism of events, the interweaving of situations, the depth of analysis of events and characters, the author's desire to uncover the deepest secrets of our primitive instincts, and especially the constant universal battle between good and evil, war and peace, life and death, which ends with the triumph of good. Wishing readers a good read, we believe they will like this novel, which in the USA is considered one of the Best Sellers and Best Historical Mysteries.