Another rewarding Doc Brady adventure.
The murder of an insurance company executive puts a plastic surgeon in jeopardy in this mystery series installment.
Houston orthopedic surgeon and author Bishop returns with a third adventure with Texas-based orthopedist Jim Bob “Doc” Brady, who has a penchant for detective work. The action starts while the doctor is attending a medical conference at a Colorado ski resort. While on the slopes, he accidentally sideswipes another skier, causing injury to fellow Houston-area plastic surgeon Lou Edwards. Despite this, they become friends, and Brady discovers that Edwards is drowning in malpractice lawsuits, as was his now-deceased partner; his malpractice insurance has been canceled, as well. Edwards’ wife, Mimi, suffers from severe lupus, allegedly acquired from leaking silicone breast implants, and across Houston, physicians are scrambling to keep their practices afloat amid scores of implant-related lawsuits. Then shady Texas Mutual Life and Casualty Insurance Company magnate Paul Thompson, who’s been canceling policies, winds up dead—shot in the head. Brady immediately begins investigating the crime alongside Houston police and becomes more involved after Edwards becomes a prime suspect. Employing his talent for investigation and persuasiveness as a “silver-tongued devil,” Brady and his wife, Mary Louise, attempt to lift suspicion from his friend, who quickly goes missing. The narrative’s exploration of breast augmentation’s problematic history adds a sense of authenticity, as do realistic forensic details, as in Thompson’s autopsy scene. Bishop sifts through suspects speedily and satisfyingly, and Brady ties up the murder after dodging a gunshot and encountering a last-minute twist. Fans of medical thrillers will enjoy the work, although it treads some familiar territory, and seasoned devotees of the Doc Brady series may find it just a bit repetitive. Still, the author’s patented mixture of homespun humor, mouthwatering culinary descriptions, and charming characterization is on full display here in a novel full of mischief and mayhem.
Another rewarding Doc Brady adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73425-114-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mantid Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
