This was my first time reading a
medical mystery. I’ve watched numerous tv shows that revolve around medical
mysteries and loved them, but never thought of picking up a book of the genre.
It wasn’t as gripping as my usual thrillers/mysteries,
but I think that’s due to the fact that there’s a lot of medical terminologies
and descriptiveness of the medical procedures which isn’t really my thing but overall,
I still quite enjoyed it!
Speaking of descriptiveness, the book goes
into very vivid descriptions and it can get really gross. It’s not for the
faint of hearts let me tell you! I usually read while eating and for this one
couldn’t do it.
Regardless, I really loved the main character,
Jessie, she is a San Francisco City medical examiner and she’s the one that solves
death of the bodies she deems as homicides.
The book did pick up near the end as
we learn more about the multiple intertwined stories which make the ending
even more surprising!
Thank you to Harper Collins for
providing me with an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley. As usual, my
reviews are my honest and unbiased opinions
Author: Judy Melinek & T.J.
Mitchell
ISBN: 9781335008305
Publication Date: January 7, 2020
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
BIO:
Judy
Melinek
was an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today
works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc.
She and T.J. Mitchell met as undergraduates at Harvard, after which she
studied medicine and practiced pathology at UCLA. Her training in forensics
at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner is the subject of their
first book, the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the
Making of a Medical Examiner.
T.J.
Mitchell
is a writer with an English degree from Harvard, and worked in the film
industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad. He is the New York
Times bestselling co-author of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies,
and the Making of a Medical Examiner with his wife, Judy Melinek.
|
BOOK
SUMMARY:
Wife
and husband duo Dr. Judy Melinek and
T.J. Mitchell first enthralled the
book world with their runaway bestselling memoir Working Stiff—a fearless account of a young forensic pathologist’s
“rookie season” as a NYC medical examiner. This winter, Dr. Melinek, now a
prominent forensic pathologist in the Bay Area, once again joins forces with
writer T.J. Mitchell to take their first stab at fiction.
The
result: FIRST CUT (Hanover Square
Press; Hardcover; January 7, 2020; $26.99)—a gritty and compelling crime debut
about a hard-nosed San Francisco
medical examiner who uncovers a dangerous conspiracy connecting the seedy
underbelly of the city’s nefarious opioid traffickers and its
ever-shifting terrain of tech startups.
Dr.
Jessie Teska has made a chilling discovery. A suspected overdose case contains
hints of something more sinister: a drug lord’s attempt at a murderous cover
up. As more bodies land on her autopsy table, Jessie uncovers a constellation
of deaths that point to an elaborate network of powerful criminals—on both
sides of the law—that will do anything to keep things buried. But autopsy means
“see for yourself,” and Jessie Teska won’t stop until she’s seen it all—even if
it means the next corpse on the slab could be her own.
SOCIAL:
TWITTER:
·
Judy: @drjudymelinek
·
TJ: @TJMitchellWS
FB:
@DrWorkingStiff
Insta: @drjudymelinek
Goodreads
·
Judy
·
TJ
BUY
LINKS:
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PROLOGUE
Los
Angeles
May
May
The dead woman
on my table had pale blue eyes, long lashes, no mascara. She
wore a thin rim of black liner on her lower lids but none on the upper. I
inserted the twelve gauge needle just far enough that I could see its beveled
tip through the pupil, then pulled the syringe plunger to aspirate a sample of
vitreous fluid. That was the first intrusion I made on her corpse during Mary
Catherine Walsh’s perfectly ordinary autopsy.
The
external examination had been unremarkable. The decedent appeared to be in her midthirties,
blond hair with dun roots, five foot four, 144 pounds. After checking her over
and noting identifying marks (monochromatic professional tattoo of a Celtic
knot on lower left flank, appendectomy scar on abdomen, well-healed stellate
scar on right knee), I picked up a scalpel and sliced from each shoulder to the
breastbone, and then all the way down her belly. I peeled back the layers of
skin and fat on her torso—an ordinary amount, maybe a little on the chubby
side—and opened the woman’s chest like a book.
I had made similar Y-incisions on 256
other bodies during my ten months as a forensic pathologist at the Los Angeles
County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office, and this one was easy. No sign of
trauma. Normal liver. Healthy lungs. There was nothing wrong with her heart.
The only significant finding was the white, granular material of the gastric
contents. In her stomach was a mass of semidigested pills.
When
I opened her uterus, I found she’d been pregnant. I measured the fetus’s
foot length and estimated its age at twelve weeks. The fetus appeared to have
been viable. It was too young to determine sex.
I deposited
the organs one by one at the end of the stainless-steel table. I had just cut
into her scalp to start on the skull when Matt, the forensic investigator who
had collected the body the day before, came in.
“Clean
scene,” he reported, depositing the paperwork on my station. “Suicide.”
I
asked him where he was going for lunch. Yogurt and a damn salad at
his desk, he told me: bad cholesterol and a worried wife. I extended my condolences
as he headed back out of the autopsy suite.
I
scanned through Matt’s handwriting on the intake sheet and learned
that the body had been found, stiff and cold, in a locked and secure room at
the Los Angeles Omni hotel. The cleaning staff called the police. The ID came
from the name on the credit card used to pay for the room, and was confirmed by
fingerprint comparison with her driver’s license thumbprint. A handwritten note
lay on the bed stand, a pill bottle in the trash. Nothing else. Matt was right:
There was no mystery to the way Mary Walsh had died.
I hit the dictaphone’s toe trigger
and pointed my mouth toward the microphone dangling over the table. “The body is
identified by a Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s tag attached to the right
great toe, inscribed LACD-03226, Walsh, Mary Catherine…”
I
broke the seal on the plastic evidence bag and pulled out the
pill bottle. It was labeled OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, and
it was empty.
“Accompanying
the body is a sealed plastic bag with an empty prescription medication bottle.
The name on the prescription label…”
I
read the name but didn’t speak it. The hair started standing
up on my neck. I looked down at my morning’s work—the splayed body, flecked
with gore, the dissected womb tossed on a heap of other organs.
That can’t be, I told
myself. It can’t.
On
the clipboard underneath the case intake sheet I found a
piece of hotel stationery sealed in another evidence bag. It was the suicide
note, written in blue ink with a steady feminine hand. I skimmed it—then
stopped, and went back.
I read it again.
I heard the clipboard land at my feet. I gripped
the raised lip of my autopsy table. I held tight while the floor fell away.
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