Hi, everyone!
Today is my turn on the Harlequin Trade Publishing Mystery and Thriller Winter 2021 Blog Tour. I am very excited to be sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell. This is a thrilling follow-up to the first book in the series, First Cut and I could not put either down.
Below you will find an author Q&A, a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Author Q&A
Q: Please give the elevator pitch for Aftershock.
A: San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can’t let a famous architect found on a construction site be quietly laid in his grave. She digs deep, both in the morgue and outside it, to find out what really happened to him. When she does, the shock waves could be worse than the earthquake that has just shaken up the city and her own life.
Q: Which came first: the characters or plot line?
A: The characters. We introduced Jessie Teska and much of the supporting cast in our debut thriller, First Cut, when Jessie was a rookie at the San Francisco medical examiner’s office. All of our plot lines come from the what-if storytelling toolkit, applying our imaginations and a noir detective story’s narrative structure to Judy’s actual experience as a San Francisco medical examiner, a job she worked for nine years—going to death scenes, performing autopsies, interviewing witnesses, and testifying in murder trials as an expert witness.
Q: Why do you love Jessie and why should readers root for her?
A: We love Jessie because she is smart, uncompromising, fearless—and, good Lord but she gets in her own way sometimes, like we all do. She is a reliable narrator and she calls it like she sees it, and our books are written from her point of view as a first-person narrator. But Jessie is human and impetuous and inexperienced in her job, so she makes mistakes. She is impolitic and blunt, and maybe a little too literal-minded, with a scientist’s naïveté about people and their secrets and their motives. It can get her into trouble. You get into it with her, and she’s the only one who can get you out. It’s just one of the things we love about the privilege of being allowed inside your skull! Metaphorically, that is.
Q: How much research do you do before beginning to write a book? Do you go to locations, ride with police, go to see an autopsy, etc.
A: Judy’s job is her day-to-day research. As a forensic pathologist, she gets called out to death scenes, investigating deaths that are sudden, unexpected and violent. She’s done more than three thousand autopsies. She is the expert the police detectives call upon when they don’t know whether a suspicious death is an accident, a suicide or a homicide. The tasks that Jessie performs in investigating her cases are the same that Judy does in investigating hers, though Jessie has a lot less experience than Judy and is much more willing to break the rules! We do additional research by consulting and interviewing other experts in areas we don’t know about. In Aftershock, this included seasoned building contractors and construction professionals, retired police, DNA laboratory scientists, and lawyers with specific areas of specialization we can’t reveal without plot spoilers. We certainly know what we don’t know, and we’re extremely lucky to have access through collegial networks to many and sundry forensic professionals who can help us work real science into our imagined stories.
Q: What hobbies do you enjoy?
A: Judy loves to paint, craft (embroidery, sewing, jewelry-craft), and hike. T.J. is an avid bicyclist. We also love to travel and discover new foods. T.J. is the cook in the family, while Judy is the baker.
Q: Do you write under one name for all books across genres or do you have other AKA’s?
A: We write under our own names in both nonfiction (Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner) and fiction (First Cut, Aftershock). Together we also write a column called “Working Stiff” for MedPage Today, but that is published under Judy’s solo byline.
Q: Do you have pets?
A: We have a youngish mutt named Winston, a Chihuahua/wirehaired terrier mix, we think. We didn’t choose the name; he’s a rescue from Pets in Need in Redwood City, California, and came with it. T.J., who comes from a New England fishing town, figured that, like with a boat, it was bad luck to change the dog’s given name. We try to get him to model next to our books for online photos and whatnot, if he can manage to sit still long enough—which, generally, he can’t. He’s a very good boy.
Q: What’s your favorite part of writing suspense?
A: Judy’s favorite parts are going for hikes together where we work out our plot lines, our subplots, our feints and reveals. She also enjoys the serendipity of discovering things in the newspaper or on her real-life autopsy case list that can spark ideas. T.J.’s favorite part is sitting alone in a room, wrestling with commas. We both enjoy getting together after T.J. has had a full day of doing just that. Judy will read back what he has written, usually as T.J. is preparing dinner for the family, and we will make edits together along the way. We also have opposite body clocks, and T.J. will often burn the midnight oil writing so that Judy can suggest edits and revisions in the early morning, when she’s up and alert and getting ready to go to the morgue for the new day’s autopsies.
Q: Do you prefer reading and/or writing suspense with elements of romance? Why or why not?
A: Romance? Maybe. But sex—? For sure. Sex and humor, both. Noir doesn’t mean dour. We really enjoy giving Jessie a love life, or at least a sex life. That said, in our detective stories, sex can often turn into one more way for characters to lie to and manipulate one another. It also makes for great red-herring territory! Get your characters panting a little, and you can lead your readers around by the…nose. It’s tricky, but if you do it right, it can be a lot of fun. Just like—well, romance.
Q: From the books you’ve written or read, who has been your favorite villain and why?
A: A favorite villain for Judy is Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty as written by Arthur Conan Doyle—someone who is smart and Machiavellian, not just evil or crazy. One of T.J.’s favorite villains is Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock—though Pinkie isn’t really the villain of that book, is he? We both tend to gravitate to stories in which the killer is not necessarily the true villain, and in which that villainy isn’t straightforward or single-sided.
Q: What was your last 5 star read?
A: Judy’s latest favorite is the nonfiction Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez. It’s one of those books that makes you re-examine the world as we perceive it—and how we have built it. T.J.’s last five-star read is Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha. It’s hard to add a new great novel to the pantheon of Los Angeles noir, but she has done it magnificently.
Q: What is one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?
A: That it’s a sales job, and a lifetime one. You can write the best book ever, but if nobody reads it, then they will never know. You have to be just as proficient at marketing and selling your book as you have to be in crafting the plot and characters.
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Book Summary
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 authors of Working Stiff and First Cut.
At first glance, the death appears to be an accident. The body is located on a construction site under what looks like a collapse beam. But when Dr. Jessie Teska arrives on the scene, she notices the tell-tale signs of a staged death. The victim has been murdered. A rising star in the San Francisco forensics world, Jessie is ready to unravel the case, help bring the murderer to justice, and prevent him from potentially striking again.
But when a major earthquake strikes San Francisco right at Halloween, Jessie and the rest of the city are left reeling. And even if she emerges from the rubble, there’s no guaranteeing she’ll make it out alive.
With their trademark blend of propulsive prose, deft plotting and mordant humor, this electrifying new installment in the Jessie Teska Mystery series offers the highest stakes yet.
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53290210-aftershock?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=xmVoL7m6YM&rank=1
AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery Book #2)
Author: Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell
ISBN: 9781335147295
Publication Date: January 19, 2020
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
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My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery Book #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell is a thrilling second book in this mystery series. I love that the intelligent and persistent Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can never stop questioning with just the autopsy. Even though this is the second book in the series it can easily be read as a standalone.
Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska gets an early morning call for a dead body that appears to be the result of a terrible construction accident. The deceased is a famous architect who appears daily on the construction site and causes problems with the workers. On further inspection at the construction site and at autopsy, Dr. Jessie Teska discovers the accident is a cover-up for a murder.
As Jessie investigates, an earthquake rocks San Francisco and derails her investigation. When she is able to look into the murder once again, an innocent man is being framed. Will Jessie be able to unearth the truth before she becomes another construction site casualty?
I love this series and protagonist! The authors bring you into medical examiners autopsy rooms and lives with writing that brings them to life on the page. Jessie is an intelligent, determined and dogged seeker of truth with a messy personal life that I love to follow and cheer on. The plot of this book throws plenty of twists and red herrings at the reader which keeps the pages turning. While I suspected the guilty individual, it was the “How” that kept me guessing. This is an excellent addition to this mystery series and I am looking forward to many more.
I highly recommend this mystery, protagonist and authors!
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Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A steel band cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” makes for a lousy way to lurch awake. Couple of months back, some clown of a coworker got ahold of my cell phone while I was busy in the autopsy suite, and reprogrammed the ringtone for incoming calls from the Medical Examiner Operations and Investigation Dispatch Communications Center. I keep forgetting to fix it.
I reached across my bedmate to the only table in the tiny room and managed to squelch it before the plinking got past five or six bars, but that was more than enough to wake him.
“Time is it?” Anup slurred.
“Four thirty.”
“God, Jessie,” he said, and pulled a pillow over his head. I planted a nice warm kiss on the back of his neck.
Donna Griello from the night shift was on the phone. “Good morning, Dr. Teska,” she said.
“Okay, Donna,” I whispered. “What do we got and where are we going?”
I didn’t need the GPS navigation from my one extravagance in this world, the BMW 235i that I had brought along when I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because muscle memory took me there. The death scene was right on my old commute—a straight shot from the Outer Richmond District, along the edge of Golden Gate Park, then the wiggle down to SoMa, the broad, flat neighborhood south of Market Street. The blue lights were flashing on the corner of Sixth Street and Folsom, just a couple of blocks shy of the Hall of Justice. I used to perform autopsies in the bowels of the Hall, before the boss, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Howe, moved the whole operation to his purpose-built dream morgue, way out in Hunters Point. Along the way, Howe made me his deputy chief. The promotion came with a raise, an office, and a ficus, but I hadn’t sought it and it wasn’t welcome—I was only a year and change on the job and didn’t have the experience to be deputy chief in a big city. Howe needed someone to do it, though. So the gold badge and all its headaches went to me.
The death scene address Donna had given me over the phone was a construction site. From the outside, I couldn’t tell how big. They’d built a temporary sidewalk covered in plywood, and posted an artist’s rendition of a gleaming glass tower, crusted in niches and crenellations and funky angles, dubbed SoMa Centre.
I double-parked behind a police car and walked the plankway between a blind fence and a line of pickup trucks with union bumper stickers. The men in them eyed me with either suspicion or practiced blankness while they waited for their job site to reopen. A beat cop kept vigil at the head of the line. He took my name and badge number, logged me in, and lifted the yellow tape. He pointed to a wooden crate. It was full of construction hard hats.
“Mandatory,” he said.
“You aren’t wearing one,” I griped.
“I’m not going in there, either.”
“Good for you. Give me a light over here.”
I sorted through the helmets under the cop’s flashlight beam. Sizes large, extra large, medium. I am a woman, five feet five inches, a hundred thirty-four pounds, and not especially husky of skull. I certainly wasn’t husky enough to fill out a helmet spec’d for your average male ironworker, which seemed to be all that was on offer.
I tried out a medium. Even when I cinched the plastic headband all the way, the hard hat swallowed my sorry little blond noggin.
“Yeah, laugh it up, Officer,” I said, while he did.
“Sorry, Doc. You look like a kid playing soldier!”
“Laugh it up,” I said again, because I wasn’t equipped, at that hour, to be clever.
Not all the workers were stuck outside in their pickups. A few men in hard hats stood around, waiting for work to get going. They shied away from me, in my medical examiner windbreaker, polyester slacks, and sensible shoes, like I was the angel of death collecting on a debt.
I found Donna. She’s hard to miss: more than six feet tall, eyes and beak like a hawk. Her hard hat fit just fine. She was leaning against the medical examiner removals van with Cameron Blake, her partner 2578—our bureaucratic shorthand for death scene investigators—on the night shift. Cam is round-faced and ruddy, half a foot shorter than Donna but just as brawny. He greeted me.
“Any coffee?” I said.
“The site superintendent says it’s brewing. First shift is just getting here. That’s how come they found the body. You want to talk to him?”
“The body?”
“The superintendent.”
“Let’s find out what the dead guy has to say first.”
Donna chuckled in a dark way. “Just you wait and see, Doc.”
The pair of 2578s led me across the construction site by flashlight. Work lights were coming on, but they left big dark gaps.
“Who found the body?”
Donna consulted her clipboard. “Dispatch says a worker named Samuel Urias, opening up after the night shift.”
The construction site by flashlight was a spooky place, even by my standards. Dirty yellow machines loomed in the beams, and plastic sheeting fluttered from the shadows. Our feet crunched on gravel, then whispered over packed dirt. The only thing that was well lit was a mobile office trailer, on a rise to our left, surrounded by silhouettes in hard hats.
Donna led us toward a detached flatbed trailer, parked with its landing-gear feet pressing into the dirt. It was loaded with long metal pipes, six or eight inches in diameter, in bundles of twenty or so. The bundles were bound together with tight black bands at either end and had been stacked four high on the flatbed. One of the bands securing the top bundle had snapped. It waved drunkenly in the air—and half a dozen pipes lay tumbled in the dirt.
Underneath them was a body.
It was a man. He was on his back. His head and shoulders were crushed under the pipes. He wore a business suit and black wingtip shoes, the left one coming off at the heel. His arms were flung out. I determined his race to be white from his hands, which offered the only visible skin. They were clean and uncalloused, fingernails manicured, wedding band on the left ring finger, a college ring on the right.
I shined my flashlight at the pipes. They had done a job on him. We walked around the body, looking for a pool of blood. There wasn’t one.
When I pointed this out, Donna elbowed Cameron and smirked. He scowled back.
“What?” I said.
“I noticed that too,” Donna said. “Cam thinks it’s no big deal.”
“Can we just get this guy out of here?” Cameron said. “The superintendent is antsy. He’s worried about press, and I don’t blame him.”
I crouched to take a closer look at that left shoe. The leather above the heel was badly scuffed. Same for the right one. The dead man’s pricey wool dress pants were torn at the hems. My flashlight picked up a faint trail in the dirt running away from his feet. I warned the 2578s to watch their step until the police crime scene unit had photographed the area.
“What—?” said Cam. “CSI isn’t here. This is an accident scene.”
“Get them. This is a suspicious death.”
“Oh, come on…”
“It’s fishy.” I pointed my flashlight around. “Where’s all the blood from that crush injury? There’s drag marks and damage to the clothing to match. Soft hands, expensive suit. Where’s his hard hat?”
“Maybe it’s under the pipes.”
“Maybe. But does this guy look like he belongs on a construction site, after hours? No way I’m assuming this was an accident.”
“Told you it was staged,” Donna said to Cam.
“Whatever,” he muttered back. He pulled out his phone, said good morning to the police dispatcher, and asked for the crime scene unit.
The sky was lightening behind the downtown towers a few blocks away, and more construction workers were starting to trickle in. “We need a perimeter,” I said. “And I want to talk to the man who found the body. Do we have a presumptive ID?”
“We found this just like you see it, and didn’t run his pockets yet,” Donna said.
“Let’s wait till crime scene documents everything before we touch him.”
Donna smiled. “Because this is fishy, right?”
I couldn’t help smiling back. “You won the bet. Leave Cam alone.” I started toward the lit-up office trailer.
“Where you going?” Donna said.
“Coffee.”
A figure in the small crowd huddling at the trailer saw me coming and met me halfway. He was a late-middle-aged white man with a gray mustache, dressed like a soccer dad in blue jeans and a collared shirt. No tie, no jacket, heavy work boots. He had a fancy hard hat. It said site super.
“Where’s the hearse?” the construction superintendent demanded.
I introduced myself and told him we were waiting for the police crime scene unit to arrive and document the scene.
“How long will that take?”
Fuck if I know, I thought. “It could be a while,” I said.
“What’s a while? We have work to do here.”
Bałwan. I grew up outside of Boston, but Polish is my first language. Sort of. My mother is from Poland and my father is a son of a bitch. Mamusia taught me and my brother Tomasz the mother tongue—which Dad doesn’t speak—and the three of us stuck with it inside the four walls of our three-decker flat on Pinkham Street in East Lynn. Mamusia said it was to preserve our heritage. It was also useful for hiding things from the old man.
Polish has a lot of terms for a son of a bitch. Bałwan was Mamusia’s word for her husband Arthur Teska on a good day. If he had been drinking, he was a sukinsyn. So far, the site superintendent was turning out to be a bałwan, but the day was young.
“First the police will do their job, then my colleagues and I will do our job, and then you can get back to yours.”
“But the police are already here, and they aren’t doing anything!”
“We’re waiting for the homicide division.”
The superintendent went pale and stammery. “Homicide—? But this isn’t… This is…”
“This is a death scene. It might be a crime scene. That’s for the police to determine before I can continue my investigation as the medical examiner, and certainly before we can remove or even touch that body.”
The superintendent said nothing. He dug into his pocket for a phone and walked away, dialing. Not an unusual reaction. People freak out when they hear homicide is coming.
Excerpted from Aftershock by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell, copyright © 2021 by Dr. Judy Melinek and Thomas J. Mitchell. Published by Hanover Square Press.
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Author Bio
Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell are the New York Times bestselling co-authors of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, and the novel First Cut. Dr. Melinek studied at Harvard and UCLA, was a medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. T.J. Mitchell, her husband, is a writer with an English degree from Harvard, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad to their children.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
TWITTER:
- Judy: @drjudymelinek
- TJ: @TJMitchellWS
FB: @DrWorkingStiff
Insta:
- Judy: @drjudymelinek
Goodreads:
- Judy: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7382113.Judy_Melinek
- TJ: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1899585.T_J_Mitchell
BUY LINKS
