An engrossing and satisfying mystery with a humble Texas physician/sleuth at its heart.
The death of a child shocks a tightly knit community and sparks an intense homicide investigation in this series opener.
Veteran Houston physician and debut author Bishop kicks off a medical thriller series featuring Texas family man and orthopedic surgeon Jim Bob “Doc” Brady. It’s the spring of 1994, and Brady hears a “sickening thud” and the screeching of tires behind his house in what is typically a peaceful neighborhood. He discovers 10-year-old Stevie Huntley, a neighbor’s son, crushed in the street, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. Immediately labeled a vehicular homicide, the case is assigned to local detective Susan Beeson. Without leads, Beeson leans on the Brady family for discreet assistance and insider information on the neighborhood. His conversations reveal that Stevie had a bone fragility disease and raise the suspicion that the homicide was premeditated. And when medical colleague T. Edmund “Ed” Wilson begins acting with uncharacteristic aggression, Brady fears something more nefarious is afloat. Shaken but unbroken by the tragedy, the resilient Doc Brady aims to help police solve a crime that, as things progress, involves genetics, adoptions, and the extended Huntley family along with some heinously dishonorable intentions. Bishop never lets genetic jargon overwhelm the story’s momentum as more suspicious deaths occur and the race to bring the perpetrators to justice becomes everyone’s top priority. Greed—not surprisingly—figures into the plot. Though the action ignites from the opening pages, Bishop incrementally introduces his characters, including Brady’s computer-savvy son, J.J., and the doctor’s wife, Mary Louise, with whom he shares a playful intimacy. Brady is a naturally warmhearted first-person narrator, describing events with urgency while incorporating homespun nuances and clever banter. With a marked absence of gore, graphic violence, or offensive language, this novel gives readers an intriguing puzzle to solve yet not an overly complicated one, opening his readership to a young adult audience as well.
An engrossing and satisfying mystery with a humble Texas physician/sleuth at its heart.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73425-110-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Mantid Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But,...
“I started dreaming of getting rich, which, in Florida anyway, can lead to serious trouble”: another blockbuster in the making from Grisham (Rogue Lawyer, 2015, etc.), the ascended master of the legal procedural.
If justice is blind, it is also served, in theory, by incorruptible servants. Emphasize “in theory,” for as Grisham’s latest opens, judicial investigator Lacy Stoltz is confronted with the unpleasant possibility that a highly regarded judge may be on the take. The charge comes, discreetly, from a former lawyer–turned-jailbird-turned-lawyer again, who spins out a seemingly improbable tale of racketeering that weds the best elements of Gulf Coast society with the worst, from the brilliant legal minds of Tallahassee to some very unpleasant lads once styled as the Catfish Mafia, now reborn in an alt-version, the Coast Mafia. Lacy’s brief is to find out just how rotten the rotten judge is—and the answer is plenty. Naturally, this knowledge is not acquired without cost; the body count rises, bad things happen to good people, and for a time, at least, the villains get away with murder and more. Grisham has never been strong on characterization: Lacy, we learn, is content to be single, “to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself,” and so forth, but beyond that the reader doesn’t get much sense of what drives her to put herself in the way of flying bullets and sneering counsel: “His associate was Ian Archer, an unsmiling sort who refused to shake hands with anyone and reeked of surliness.” In laid-back Florida? Indeed, and in Grisham’s busy hands, a lot of players come and go, some fated to sleep with the manatees.
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But, like eating a junk burger, even though you probably shouldn’t, it’s plenty satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54119-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Red-hot storytelling.
Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.
Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.
Red-hot storytelling.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565073
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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