The Quiet Boy

From the bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden State,this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time–and the team of lawyersdoctorsand detectives who are desperate to wake him up. In 2008a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golemabsent all normal functioning or personalitywalking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019Shenk–still in practice but a shell of his former self–is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murderas it turns outof the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted sona fragile teenager in 2008is a wayward adultthough he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness. Two thrilling trials braid togethermedical malpractice and murderjostling us back and forth in time. The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteriesnot only about the death of a brilliant scientistnot only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suitbut about the relationship between children and their parentsbetween the past and the presentbetween truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keenerendlessly walkingstaring empty-eyedin whose quiethollow body may lie the fate of humankind.