The Weeping Buddha Book

What would you do if someone you were dancing with at a New Year's Eve party went out for breath of fresh air and never came back? Ever.

Heather Dune Macadam's first novel is based on just such a personal experience.

“I was twenty-three the night Sam Todd disappeared from our New Year's Eve Party in Chinatown. The question of what happened to that young man has haunted me for years, until finally it seemed that the only way to exorcise the past was to make it fiction. THE WEEPING BUDDHA is my worst nightmare made manifest in fiction. It is the result of imagination being left alone too long with an unanswerable riddle--a Zen Koan, if you will. What ever happened to Todd?”

New Year's Eve, 2001. Suffolk County Crimes Scene Detective Devon Halsey and her boyfriend, Homicide Detective Lochwood Brennen, are more interested in their own celebration when they are suddenly thrust into a New Year's mayhem worse than either could have imagined. What do seasoned detectives do when faced with the complex situation of maintaining a murder crime scene's integrity where they know both of the victims? They do their jobs.

The past nags on Devon Halsey as she walks through the crime scene. The physical and circumstantial evidence points to the murderer being Beka Imamura, Devon Halsey's best friend. The victim, Beka's own husband, renowned artist Gabriel Montebello. What appears to be a relationship gone sour and ended in a murder/suicide conflicts with Devon's personal knowledge of her friend. At the Northwest Woods Zendo in East Hampton, where Beka and Devon occasioned over the years, a monk has found Beka's hair on the altar of Buddha. Devon works the scene, but the evidence all points to Beka offering her hair as a sign of grief--what was she grieving, though?

What has haunted Devon for years begins to take shape in the present day. Dissecting the case file, she learns that a carving in the victim is actually a Koan--an unanswerable question that must be meditated upon in order to reach enlightenment. In the true nature of the Koan, Devon and Lochwood must find the answers in order to solve the crime, while also looking at the nature of betrayal and its many layers of disguise.

Heather Dune Macadam is a professor at Suffolk County Community College and Dowling College, and a former dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. She is the author of Rena's Promise, a memoir about the 1716th Jewish woman in Auschwitz death camp, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, New York Times, and The Advocate. Heather Dune Macadam used to live in Sag Harbor, but can no longer afford it.