Superb female characters enrich this engrossing tale of medical scares and legal tussling.
In this debut thriller, a Seattle divorce lawyer targets a dubious surgeon when a patient’s sudden death hits close to home.
Camille Delaney has made a comfortable life for her husband and their three daughters. She makes good money handling divorces, as many of her clients are doctors. Sadly, tragedy strikes when Dallas Jackson, her beloved mentor and father figure, dies. But his death on an operating table stirs up endless questions: Why was his gallbladder surgery an emergency, and why does his chart have no mention of the aneurysm that supposedly killed him? Most of the suspicion revolves around Dr. Andrew Willcox, the aloof surgeon who wielded the scalpel and, as it turns out, may have faked his credentials. As Camille’s firm strictly forbids taking cases against physicians, she goes out on her own, with Dallas’ widow as the plaintiff. Ever shady Willcox has money and connections, leveling thinly veiled threats against Camille’s family and scaring people into not testifying against him. But Camille is determined to stop this doctor, whose patients habitually die and who’s up to something truly diabolical. Indelible female characters populate DuBois’ series opener. Camille’s skills as a former emergency room nurse prove beneficial in this case. And investigator Trish Seaholm, Camille’s reliable friend, once worked as a cop. In contrast, most of the generally incompetent men hardly register, even as villains; one man assaults and threatens the wrong person and, still ignorant, boasts about it later. The male players do nevertheless make it easy to root for Camille, as Willcox’s and others’ laundry lists of deplorable deeds include fraud, coverups, and worse. The author, a lawyer and former nurse, writes keen dialogue that clearly explains terminology, especially medical, in a smart and entertaining fashion. While the story’s villainy isn’t much of a mystery by design, Camille’s valiant fight to bring down Willcox will persistently engage readers.
Superb female characters enrich this engrossing tale of medical scares and legal tussling.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954854-34-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Girl Friday Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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