The Captain

by Seymour Shubin

THE CAPTAIN is the story of a retired, much-decorated and beloved police detective who is placed in a nursing home by his grown children who could have taken him in. There he sees people who he looks on as criminals--a nurse, for instance, who is quick to tie up patients, a doctor who is negligent in his care. Shocked and tormented, this strict law-and-order man begins his own form of capital punishment. When a nurse is killed, the police who swarm in are saddened by the sight of the Captain who has planted himself in a wheelchair and seems unable to speak a word. They would never think of him as a killer. Indeed, against the backdrop of a love affair between a nurse and a doctor, the Captain even manages to slip out of the home to take his form of justice on people who are harming the elderly. And all the while the reader is in this old man’s head as this very human drama moves from one climax to another.