Sunday, January 5, 2020

BLOG TOUR - First Cut


Today is my stop on the Blog Tour for First Cut by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell.

Title:   First Cut
Author:  Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell
Genre:   Mystery/Thrillers
Publisher:  Hanover Square Press
Format:  Kindle ARC
No. of Pages:   368
Date of Publication:   January 7, 2020
My Rating:   4 Stars

DESCRIPTION:


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.

BUY LINKS:
Books-A-Million | Target | Walmart | Google | iBooks |Kobo

Please enjoy the following excerpt:

PROLOGUE

Los Angeles 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.

MY THOUGHTS:

Dr. Jessie Teska's newest case as a medical examiner, and a new job at that, has her realizing that what was first thought to be an overdose was actually something much more - murder.

She wants to push things. To investigate. Instead she faces the obstacle of going against her supervisor. She is told to wrap things up, but Jessie just can't let it go. What is more is her work environment, now in San Francisco. She is completely nonplussed. At her previous job in Los Angeles, everything was shiny and clean. She also had technology at her disposal. Now, things are grimy, rather old school.

Adding in the suspicions about the body on her slab, how can Jessie even work? Meanwhile, more deaths abound. Jessie takes no time to connect it with the first case. Shockingly she discovers that there is an opiod crisis..Can Jessie get to the bottom of things, and stay safe in the meantime?

I love how Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell wrote this book. I felt like I was there with Jessie, asking questions and demanding answers. I also enjoyed that it was not too technical, even though it was gruesome at times. The fact that Melinek is a forensic psychologist helped to give Jessie's character a sense of authenticity. First Cut proved to be a job well-done, so much so that I do hope we get to see Jessie again.

Many thanks to Hanover Square Press and to NetGalley for this ARC for review. This is my honest opinion.


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

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.

TWITTER:
·         Judy: @drjudymelinek
·         TJ: @TJMitchellWS
Facebook: @DrWorkingStiff
Instagram:
·         Judy: @drjudymelinek
Goodreads

7 comments:

  1. Happy you loved it. I really need to read more adult thriller/mystery. Thank you for sharing I will look into this one.

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  2. This sounds right up my alley. Thanks for sharing!

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  3. I have this one coming up on my calendar - glad to see you enjoyed it

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  4. Glad you enjoyed it. I think I will add this to my list.

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  5. Great review, not a book I've heard of before but something I would definitely read.

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  6. Sounds like a book I would like.

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  7. Great review Robin I am really glad you fully enjoyed reading this book, and it really looks and sounds like an amazing book and right up my alley as well. Thank you so much for sharing your awesome post.

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