Close to the Bone

August 18, 2014
At the start of Black’s intricately plotted seventh Theresa MacLean mystery (after 2013’s The Price of Innocence), Theresa arrives early one morning at Cleveland’s cash-strapped Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office, where she literally steps into a pool of blood seeping from the fatal wounds of deskman Darryl Johnson. More homicides rapidly follow elsewhere, and Theresa, an intrepid 12-year veteran of the Trace Evidence Department, connects the killings to the decade-old strangling of coworker Diane Allman. Theresa descends Nancy Drew–like into creepy morgue vaults, eludes a lascivious morgue assistant, and ingeniously extricates herself from the trunk of the killer’s car, but she overlooks the close attention police sergeant Louis Shephard is paying to the case—and to her. Black, who is a forensic scientist, certainly knows her field; readers should be prepared for medical minutiae and graphic autopsy details that tend toward grisly overkill. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

September 2, 2013
Romance comes to Theresa MacLean for the first time since her fiancé’s death, in Black’s satisfying sixth mystery featuring the Cleveland forensic scientist (after Blunt Impact). From the moment Theresa meets David Madison she’s captivated. That the feeling appears to be mutual, though, only serves to make the savvy crime fighter suspicious. Questions plague her. How does he know the murder victim at whose funeral they meet? Is David connected to a 25-year-old fire in Cleveland State University student housing—a fire that’s somehow connected to a series of explosions she’s currently investigating? Are these explosions related to the sudden rash of untimely deaths among a group of old college friends? Everywhere she looks, Theresa sees vague links but no hard evidence. With only her gut to go on, she—and the reader—scud through a series of devilishly clever blind alleys and red herrings, some more contrived than others, until everything ties together. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

October 1, 2014
A forensic scientist investigates a murder at her own morgue. As accustomed as Theresa MacLean is to bodily fluids, it still gives her quite a jolt to discover a trail of blood in the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's office. Even worse is her discovery of the body of desk man Darryl Johnson, covered in blood, with the word "Confess" written in blood on the wall above him. But whoever has it in for the ME's office isn't done yet. Concerned that Dr. Hubert Reese, one of the unit's pathologists, doesn't answer his phone, Theresa goes to his spacious Fairmount Boulevard home and finds him bleeding to death. Now Theresa's inclined to regard the death of any ME office employee as suspicious. She looks into the demise of ambulance crew member George Bain, a retired cop who succumbed to a heart attack within his first year at his new job. And she hits pay dirt when she goes back several years to the death of Diana Allman, one of the office's secretaries. Diana was killed at home, and her husband, James, served prison time for her murder. Was there more to her story than a simple domestic dispute? Does someone blame the ME's office for mishandling the autopsy and forensic investigation of the death of one of their own? Theresa needs to find answers fast, because the killer has set his or her sights on Theresa's colleague and friend, DNA analyst Don Delgado, and on Theresa herself. By releasing surprises little by little, Black manages to fit both a whodunit and a police-chase thriller into a single bagged-and-tagged package.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014
Late one evening, when Cleveland forensic scientist Theresa MacLean returns to her lab, she has no clue that this will be the start of a terrifying episode in her already crazy life. As she enters the building, she finds one of the security guards bludgeoned to death and the other missing. Plus, the word confess is written in blood near the dead guard's body. Then a second victim and a third are found. Theresa is sure there's a link between the killings, but the only connection she can see is that all of the victims worked with her at the medical examiner's office. Eventually, she links the deaths to the murder of Diane Allman, a records secretary at the ME's office who was brutally strangled 10 years earlier. Theresa's sure she knows who the killer is, but proving it is another matter altogether. Taut suspense, a brave and likable heroine, a clever plot, and a slam-bang ending add up to a high-water mark for this popular series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)