ILL INTENT

The murder of a friend’s postdoctoral researcher draws Dr. Brad Parker and Agent Karen Richmond into a decades-old scientific mystery.

Early on in this story, Brad remembers how he was asked to volunteer—“or, more accurately, voluntold”—to temporarily move from Boston University to the Maine Translational Research Institute and ended up staying on as director after he and Karen uncovered a scandal there. This nod to the previous entry in Cooper’s series, BadMedicine (2021), comes after he discovers Ellen Turner, a postdoctoral student of faculty member Carolyn Gelman, a character in that book, was murdered during an alleged break-in. Carolyn explains the crime occurred after Ellen received a cryptic email and a letter from her scientist uncle, John Lowell, regarding a mysterious, long-ago “sin against science and truth” that apparently drove fellow scientist Frank Carlisle out of academia. Brad agrees to ask Karen to help him investigate the matter; the pair soon find Frank’s body, an apparent suicide, which leads them to a botched raid on a home where Brad kills a suspect, which he finds very hard to handle. In this fourth series installment, the author again presents a first-person mystery in a style that’s reminiscent of classic noir, and its conversational, moderately sarcastic tone makes Brad a relatable narrator. However, it also extends into darker territory; for example, Brad’s PTSD after the shooting—which includes a vision of the suspect “falling to the ground with my bullets in his chest…dying in front of me, again and again”—reveals him as a vulnerable human being who mourns for someone who might have killed him without hesitation. Cooper also continues to effectively emphasize the complexities of the academic world; here, he disentangles the mystery of Lowell’s connection to Frank’s, Ellen’s, and Carolyn’s lives at a satisfying pace, offering moments of outrage along the way.

A whodunit that effortlessly navigates a complex plot and deepens its narrator’s characterization.