The Lies Beneath

The Lies Beneath is a book by someone who knows exactly what she's talking about. Crystal Gary is a practicing physician, and it shows. When Mallory sits at her kitchen table past midnight and builds a diagram around the word CADMIUM, with arrows running out to renal cell carcinoma, miscarriages and kidney failure, the reasoning reads as lived clinical thinking, not a plot device. The slow accumulation of unremarkable-looking clues is the book's best trick: the patient with a metallic taste, the 22-year-old with a femur fractured in a carpeted-stairs fall, the 27-year-old with the lowest testosterone she has ever seen. Each one is easy to dismiss alone, and together they make a pattern the reader feels click into place.

The book's most affecting scenes are Hannah's. The first is the ultrasound report she grips until the paper creases. The second is Mallory delivering the news about fetal cadmium exposure, then stepping out of the exam room "to give them space" because she cannot bear to watch. The book gives environmental injustice a human cost and lets those scenes breathe without melodrama.

It also earns its genre. The corporate shell-game of Summit, GreenCare and Brannock is clear enough for a lay reader to follow. The warm, bickering household of Mallory, the three boys, Houdini the bobtailed cat and a handyman who "finds his studs" gives the thriller something worth protecting. A reader who wants a medical mystery with a big heart and a villain you can boo will find exactly that.