Review:
Dr. Jessie Teska is new to the San Francisco Medical Examiner's scene, but she is not new to forensic pathology. A star in LA, she finds the new conditions horrendous. As she struggles to fit in, she begins to notice unexpected patterns, too many non-accidental deaths, and conspiracy. Of course she won't stop prying, and soon her life is now in the crosshairs.
FIRST CUT
Author: Judy
Melinek & T.J. Mitchell
ISBN:
9781335008305
Publication Date:
January 7, 2020
Publisher:
Hanover Square Press
BIO:
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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.
|
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:
- Judy: @drjudymelinek
Goodreads
BUY LINKS:
Walmart
PROLOGUE
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.
Q&A with Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell
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 Vonnegut.
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!
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