Book Review AND Bonus Excerpt – First Cut by Judy Melinek, MD and T.J. Mitchell

Today I’m pleased to bring you another in the Harlequin Blog Tour series. This one is a dive into the dark and gruesome – but utterly fascinating – world of forensic medical examination. There’s a bonus excerpt at the end – trust me when I say it’s worth the read!

Book Review

What a fabulous find this was!

I’m fascinated by what forensics and forensic medical examiners are able to uncover based on the remains – no matter how degraded or diminished – of the human body… In this excellent story, Melinek and Mitchell have crafted a world that is sinister and scientific and full of secrets, and they’ve wrapped a messy but enthralling mystery inside of it. Add in a cast of characters that are complex, well-developed, and full of quirks and foibles and you have the making of a compelling story that I couldn’t put down until I knew how it would all end…

Jessie Teska is surrounded by lies and liars – everyone from the bodies she examines to her colleagues and superiors has a secret, and it seems to fall on her shoulders to decipher (or at least navigate) through the minefields that those secrets represent. She is a fantastic protagonist – complicated, snarky, and full of secrets of her own that (of course) complicate matters deviously.

This was a great combination of medical mystery, crime, and revelatory thriller. The writing is fast-paced with just enough cringe-inducing descriptions of the process of medical examination to thrill and chill. Jessie’s tale grabbed me from the first pages and never let go. I’m hoping this turns out to be a first-in-series. The characters are wonderful and there’s great potential for continuation here…

Thank you to the author and publisher for my obligation-free review copy.

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.

***