S.J. Rozan’s First Do No Harm is a popular book to review this season. Author Dana Stabenow read and reviewed it a couple weeks ago on her blog. You can still order a copy through the Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/4k2rsy8p
Thank you, Dana, for sharing your review.
“When I go,” Juarez said, “I want to leave a crater.”
There’s a thing editors hammer home to the authors of a new book in a series–Don’t forget the backstory! You never know when someone new to a series will pick up a copy of, oh, say the sixteenth book in a series about a two-person PI agency in New York City, one a Chinese American woman and the other an ex-Southerner his partner’s mom persists in calling the “White Baboon” no matter how preppy he dresses with her in mind. Yes, it’s Lydia-and-Bill time again and in this case Rozan serves up a picture-perfect, by the numbers investigation into the murder of a nurse at the hospital where Lydia’s brother Elliott runs the ER. The police have a suspect but Elliott thinks he’s innocent and asks Lydia and Bill to find out who did.
The victim had not been well-loved, and as the case develops isn’t by Lydia and Bill, either.
“Oh my God,” I said. I was on the verge of adding that if I were on the committee I’d want to kill her, but that seemed monumentally tasteless, considering someone actually had.
The subsequent plot has has more divagations than a sidewinder as Linda and Bill keep turning up an astonishing amount of scams at the hospital, including theft, embezzlement, bribery, payroll fraud, and I’m not sure that room in the basement qualifies as running a brothel but [redacted] sure made a pile off it. The victim was involved in some way in all of the scams but frustratingly none of them was what got her killed. Curiouser and curiouser.
Some old friends reappear, like Linus and Trella
I called my cousin Linus Wong, founder and president of Wong Security Services (“Protecting People Like You from People Like Us”), a two-person cyber firm operating out of Linus’s parents’ garage in Flushing, Queens.
“Cuz!”
“I want to hire you, if you’re not too busy.“
“Too busy for you?” Linus said. “My mom would kill me. Wassup?”
t’s good to have relatives in the biz, whatever that biz is. There are plenty of new people, too, like a progressively crankier NYPD detective
“That lawyer—Cohen?—already left me standing with my thumb up my ass, circumstantial this, circumstantial that, and I didn’t exactly appreciate it. Next time I arrest that weirdo I’ll have all the evidence I need.”
“And if you don’t?” I said.
She stared straight at me. “I won’t arrest him until I do. If you two fuck with me, though, I’ll arrest you on any pretext I can find.”
a security officer I suspect will be working for Lydia and Bill before long
Juarez took two tentative steps forward to get a closer look at the concrete where Sophia Scott had died. “Not much to see, is there?”
“No.”
“When I go,” Juarez said, “I want to leave a crater.”
a couple of morgue attendants, whose proper job title you will learn is “diener,” with a serious pun problem
“Usually it’s not this dead.”
I glanced from one to the other. “You don’t really make dead jokes here.”
“They do,” said Juarez. “And you can’t get them to stop.”
Paul shrugged. “Kills the time.”
“There’s a large body of evidence proving that,” Valerie said. “But Juarez doesn’t dig it. She’s too stiff.”
“Gallows humor,” said Paul. “I mean, we’re just hangin around.”
and a hospital administrator who got rid of her soul so she’d have more room for her ambition to succeed no matter what it cost anyone else.
“The police think it’s likely he’s guilty. So likely that I understand he’s been re-arrested. I get frequent updates on their investigation.”
I almost said, Wonderful for you, so do we, but it could get very playground in here very fast.
It’s a rough-and-tumble week as as Lydia and Bill follow the dead woman down one blind alley after another, discover another victim, and orchestrate a classic “criminal returning to the scene of the crime” denouement where shots are fired, after which there is a very satisfactory showdown with the person both Lydia and I think is the true villain of the piece. You won’t believe what people get up to in those hospitals.
I do so love me an ending where maybe not everyone gets what they want but everyone who deserves it gets their due. A novel where you get a dozen plots for the price of one, told with style and substance and a fully-fleshed out backstory delivered with the subtlety of a truly professional storyteller. A very enjoyable read and one of the best in the series.