This book showed up as a freebie, and I figured I’d read it before going back to The Lord of the Rings. The Anatomy Lesson, by Robert I. Katz, wasn’t bad at all.
Our hero is Richard Kurtz, a young New York surgeon whose sideline (and a useful one) is martial arts. The Anatomy Lesson is the second book in which he assists police detective Lew Barent in an investigation. The first time constituted the first book in the series.
The mystery starts with what looks like a grotesque practical joke. At a Halloween party for medical students, somebody substitutes genuine cadaver parts for plastic ones that had been set out as decorations. The body parts turn out to come from medical school dissection specimens, but it’s hard to figure out who could have stolen them.
Barent asks Kurtz to inquire into the matter, and one of the people he talks to is Rod Mahoney, a lecturer at the medical school. When Mahoney is murdered in a grotesque manner shortly after that, the motives remain impossible to guess, but soon there is talk of a drug connection.
The story has lots of twists and red herrings; it was challenging. I certainly didn’t figure it out. On top of that, Kurtz and Barent make an interesting team – Barent is the jaded cop who’s seen everything, while Kurtz is young and full of vinegar, and quite enjoys the opportunity to fight bad guys off now and then. Barent is always telling him to stay out of the investigation, but then doesn’t hesitate to call on him when he needs an entrée into the medical world. They’re believable and amusing.
My main problem with this book – and it was purely personal opinion – is that the cause of drug legalization keeps coming up, and the author leaves no question what he thinks. He may even be right – maybe legalization is the only way to mitigate the social disaster – but I’ve never been able to shake the idea that legalizing drugs is a marker of societal surrender and imminent death.
But that’s my opinion. The Anatomy Lesson was an enjoyable read with enjoyable characters. Cautions for the usual.