Happy release day!
Thanks to Hanover Square Press and Harlequin Books for the free early copy in exchange for my honest review and blog tour spot
FIRST CUT – Judy Melinek & T.J. Michell (Releasing January 7th, 2020)
Book 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.
My Thoughts: 4/5 stars
I had heard great things about WORKING STIFFS and even have it sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. After reading FIRST CUT, I’ll be picking it up sooner than I anticipated! Going into this one, it’s good knowing that it is very detailed and technical when it comes to the autopsy portions of the book. Having been written by a former Medical Examiner we get the expertise we might not normally get in fiction. The author’s experience and knowledge shines through in this book but I can see it slowing the pacing for some readers. I found it fascinating!
Dr. Jessie Teska has accepted a new job as the Medical Examiner in San Francisco and she is immediately plunged into the chilling world of drug lords and their criminal network. A series of deaths and all seem to be linked and all are made to appear as overdoses – but is there more than meets the eye? The deeper she gets and the more autopsies she performs she knows she’s getting closer and closer to something big, but could she be risking her own life?
Plenty of suspense and I felt it had a good pacing. Again, I think how technical some parts are when it comes to the autopsies could slow the pacing for some readers. If this topic and profession fascinates you, then I think it will move quickly and keep your attention! Overall, I loved Jessie and learning more about her job and what it all entails. I will be picking up WORKING STIFF soon and hope to see more from this writing duo.
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.
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.
Connect with the Authors:
Twitter: Judy: @drjudymelinek TJ: @TJMitchellWS
Facebook: @DrWorkingStiff
Instagram: Judy: @drjudymelinek
Goodreads: Judy: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7382113.Judy_Melinek
TJ: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1899585.T_J_Mitchell
Author Q&A:
Q: Do you plan your books in advance or let them develop as you write?
A:The idea for First Cut was prompted by some of Judy’s actual cases when she worked as a San Francisco medical examiner. She has real experience performing autopsy death investigation, and she also has the imagination to apply that experience to a fictional framework for our forensic detective, Dr. Jessie Teska. Judy invented the story, and together we worked it up as an outline. Then T.J. sat in a room wrestling with words all day—which he loves to do—to produce the first complete manuscript. That’s our inspiration plus perspiration dynamic as co-authors.
Q: What does the act of writing mean to you?
A: It is, and has always been, something we can do together, an important part of our marriage. We’ve collaborated as a creative team since we were in college together many years ago, producing and directing student theater. We’ve also spent twenty years raising our four children, and have always approached parenting as a partnership. We find it easy to work together because we write like we parent: relying on one another, each of us playing to our strengths. It helps that, in our writing process, we have no overlapping skill set!
Q: Have you ever had a character take over a story, and if so, who was it and why?
A: Oh, yes! That’s our heroine, Dr. Jessie Teska. She has elements of Judy in her, and elements of T.J., but Jessie is a distinct individual and a strong-willed one. We’re often surprised and even shocked by the ways she reacts to the situations we put her in. There are times we’ll be writing what we thought was a carefully laid-out scene, and Jessie will take us sideways. She’s coming off T.J.’s fingertips on the the keyboard, both of us watching with mouths agape, saying, “What the hell is she up to?”
Q: Which one of First Cut’s characters was the hardest to write and why?
A: Tommy Teska, Jessie’s brother. He’s a minor character to the book’s plot, but the most important person in Jessie’s life, and he’s a reticent man, downright miserly with his dialogue. Tommy carries such great emotional weight, but it was hard to draw it out of him, especially because so much of his bond to our heroine is in the backstory of First Cut, not in the immediate narrative that lands on the page. We’re now working on the sequel, Cross Cut, and finding that Tommy has more occasion to open up in that story.
Q: Which character in any of your books (First Cut or otherwise) is dearest to you and why?
A: The late Dr. Charles Sidney Hirsch, from our first book, the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Dr. Hirsch is not just a character: He was a real person, Judy’s mentor and a towering figure in the world of forensic pathology. Dr. Hirsch trained Dr. Melinek in her specific field of medicine and imbued in her his passion for it. He was a remarkable man, a great teacher and physician and public servant—a person of uncompromising integrity coupled with great emotional intelligence.
Q: What did you want to be as a child? Was it an author?
A: Judy’s father was a physician, and though she never wanted to follow in his immediate footsteps—he was a psychiatrist—she has always wanted to be another Dr. Melinek. T.J. has always been a writer, but also has theater training and worked in the film industry. As much as we enjoyed authoring the memoir Working Stiff, and as happy as we have been with its success, we are even more thrilled to be detective novelists.
Q: What does a day in the life of Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell look like?
A: Judy is a morning person and T.J.’s a night owl, so we split parenting responsibilities. Judy gets the kids off to school and then heads to the morgue, where she performs autopsies in the morning and works with police, district attorneys, and defense lawyers in the afternoon. T.J. takes care of the household and after-school duties. If we work together during the day, it’s usually by email in the late afternoon. T.J. cooks dinner, Judy goes to bed early, and he’s up late—at his most productive writing from nine to midnight or later.
Q: What do you use to inspire you when you get Writer’s Block?
A: We go for a long walk together. Our far corner of San Francisco overlooks the Pacific Ocean, bracketed by cypress trees and blown over with fog, and serves as an inspiring landscape. We explore the edge of the continent and talk out where our characters have been and where they need to get, tossing ideas back and forth until a solution, what to do next on the page, emerges. Getting away for a stroll with our imaginary friends is always a fruitful exercise!
Q: What book would you take with you to a desert island?
A: T.J. would take the Riverside Shakespeare, and Judy would take Poisonous Plants: A Handbook for Doctors, Pharmacists, Toxicologists, Biologists and Veterinarians, Illustrated.
Q: Do you have stories on the back burner that are just waiting to be written?
A: Always! We are inspired by Dr. Melinek’s real-life work, both in the morgue and at crime scenes, in police interrogation rooms, and in courtrooms. Our stories are fiction—genre fiction structured in the noir-detective tradition—but the forensic methods our detective employs and the scientific findings she comes to are drawn from real death investigations.
Q: What has been the hardest thing about publishing? What has been the most fun?
A: The hardest thing is juggling our work schedules to find uninterrupted time together to write. The most fun is meeting and talking to our readers at book events, especially those who have been inspired to go into the field of forensic pathology after reading our work.
Q: What advice would you give budding authors about publishing?
A: It’s all about connectivity. Linking up with other writers, readers, editors, and research experts is a crucial way to get your work accomplished, and to get it out to your audience. Yes, ultimately it’s just you and the keyboard, but in the course of writing your story, you can and should tap into the hive mind, online and in person, for inspiration and help.
Q: What was the last thing you read?
A: Judy last read The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, and T.J. last read The Witch Elm by Tana French.
Q: Your top five authors?
A: Judy’s are Atul Gawande, Henry James, Kathy Reichs, Mary Roach, and Oliver Sacks. T.J.’s are Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller, Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, and Kurt Vonnegt.
Q: Book you’ve bought just for the cover?
A: T.J.: Canary by Duane Swierczynski. Judy: Mütter Museum Historical Medical Photographs.
Q: Tell us about what you’re working on now.
A: First Cut is the debut novel in a detective series, and we’ve recently finished the rough draft of Cross Cut, its sequel. We are in the revision phase now, killing our darlings and tightening our tale, working to get the further adventures of Dr. Jessie Teska onto bookshelves next year!
Jessicamap Reviews 