“Peter Spiegelman’s Dr. Knox is a bruised wonder of a crime novel. Filled with page-turning intrigue and an L.A. atmosphere so richly rendered you can practically smell the ‘eucalyptus and dust,’ it is both thrilling and rueful, harrowing and moving. DON’T MISS IT”
—Megan Abbott, award-winning author of The Fever
From the author of Red Cat and Thick as Thieves: a gripping new thriller about a medical doctor with a powerful humanitarian impulse, an unhealthy appetite for risk, and a knack for finding himself between a rock and a hard place.
Adam Knox comes from a long line of patrician Connecticut doctors—a line he broke to serve with an NGO in the war-torn Central African Republic. His attempt to protect his patients there from a brutal militia ended in disaster and disgrace, and now he runs a clinic near Los Angeles’s Skid Row, making ends meet by making house calls—cash only, no questions asked—on those too famous or too criminal to seek other medical care.
When a young boy is abandoned at his clinic, Knox is determined to find the boy’s family and save him from the not-so-tender mercies of the child welfare bureaucracy. But Knox’s search for the volatile woman who may or may not be the boy’s mother leads him and his friend, a former Special Forces operator, into a labyrinth of human traffickers, Russian mobsters, and corporate security thugs; and squarely into the sights of a powerful, secretive, and utterly ruthless family that threatens to destroy Dr. Knox and everything—and everyone—he holds dear.
From the Hardcover edition.