Aftershock
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3.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
When an earthquake strikes San Francisco, forensics expert Jessie Teska faces her biggest threat yet in this explosive new mystery from the New York Times bestselling duo
There’s a body crushed under a load of pipes on a San Francisco construction site, and medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska is on call. So it’s her job to figure out who it is—and her headache when the autopsy reveals that the death is a homicide staged as an accident.
Jessie is hot on the murderer’s trail, then an earthquake sends her and her whole city reeling. When the dust clears, her case has fallen apart and an innocent man is being framed. Jessie knows she’s the only one who can prove it, and she races to piece together the truth—before it gets buried and brings her down in the rubble.
With Melinek and Mitchell’s trademark blend of propulsive prose, deft plotting and mordant humor, this rollicking new installment in the Jessie Teska Mystery series will shake you up and leave you rattled.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Melinek and Mitchell's so-so second mystery featuring San Francisco deputy chief medical examiner Jessie Teska (after 2020's First Cut) takes Teska to a construction site where a man's corpse has been found, his head crushed by a pile of pipes. Teska's preliminary observations lead her to suspect the scene was staged. After the pipes are lifted off the body, she notes the head's not surrounded by the large puddle of blood she'd expect to see if the crushing of the skull was the cause of death. At the autopsy of the victim, identified as Leopold Haring, "one of the most famous and acclaimed architects in the world," Teska discovers that a puncture wound from an unknown weapon was the actual cause of death. An earthquake and complications in Teska's romantic life add little as the lead predictably puts herself in jeopardy by investigating Haring's murder. A contrived denouement is another negative. The authors don't make Teska any sort of rival to Kathy Reichs's Temperance Brennan.
