YOUNG BLOOD

A police veteran and a distraught mother take on a doctor obsessed with finding the fountain of youth.

Maggie Wise’s decision to retire to Santa Cruz, the Florida town where her husband tried and failed to beat cancer, might very well belie her name. After 25 years in law enforcement, Maggie’s settled into a new routine as a part-time radio talk show host for WKQE and a part-time costumer at a strip club that gives her far too much time to drink and brood about her husband. The man’s she seeing, Mark Hamilton, is a police chief who can’t help thinking that Maggie’s dating him because she misses her old job. She proves him at least partly right when two little girls disappear and Maggie takes up Kelly O’Neal,  one of their mothers, as a cause. Maggie helps trace the disappearance and reappearance of Kelly’s 10-year-old daughter to Dr. Oscar LeBlanc, who’s devoted his life to reversing the aging process and relies, like a white-coated vampire, on young blood to get what he needs to treat aging Floridians for large sums. Despite Mark’s warnings to leave it alone, Maggie’s first case as an ex-cop tosses her into a sea of embezzlement, implausible medicine, and murder as she veers from professional insight to emotional neediness until you’re torn between hugging her and shaking her.

Though she keeps digging herself in more and more deeply, the heroine’s outsized heart wins forgiveness for her missteps.