The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters Narrated by William DeMeritt

Overview

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 lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake him up.

In 2008, a 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 golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room.**In 2019, Shenk-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 murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk's adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness.
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Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time.
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The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies.**At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"I get excited any time Ben Winters has a new book coming out. His writing is so intelligent, his worlds so inventive, and his novels have a rare combination of being equally entertaining and thought-provoking. I will read anything by Ben Winters, and am always eager to see what he does next."
 —Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of INTERIOR CHINATOWN

Kirkus Reviews

2021-03-03
Science fiction, the paranormal, cults, and oddball characters collide in this amiable thriller.

Something very bad has happened to young Wesley Keener. He’s cracked his skull open—just how is a matter requiring some fact-finding—and now he’s empty of everything but a bright light, something like the trunk of the car at the center of Alex Cox’s film Repo Man. “Hollow….They hollowed him out.” So thinks Jay Albert Shenk, a Los Angeles ambulance-chaser attorney who sports a tiny ponytail and a generally good-natured attitude, turning competitive only when he’s up against lesser lawyers. He’s a fine and mostly honest fellow in whom Winters, an expert practitioner of odd scenarios in books such as Underground Airlines(2016), invests much attention and character development. In company with his adopted son, Ruben, a grocery-store clerk—born in Vietnam, raised Jewish, and nicknamed “Rabbi”—Shenk tries to ferret out what it was, exactly, that happened to poor Wesley while filing a medical malpractice against the doctors—the “they” in question—who treated him once he was rushed to the hospital. “Shenk had been doing this for nineteen years…and he could give you the lowdown on every sawbones, on every hospital and clinic and urgent care in Southern California,” Winters writes. The doctors range from weary to evasive to self-appointed deity, but they’re the least of Shenk’s problems: Both he and Ruben are visited by spectral cultists who think Wesley’s shell might just harbor a portal to another world. Wesley’s dad is a handful, the expert witness Shenk hires turns out to be a slippery character, and Wesley’s sister, Evie, “not a rock star, not exactly, but she was a certified indie darling, her star ascendant,” has plenty of complicating secrets of her own. Winters’ lively tale jumps from decade to decade and all over the map as everyone grows older except Wesley, with a growing trail of bodies and suspects to mark the story’s passage.

An entertaining concoction with plenty of twists on the way to a nicely unexpected resolution.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177480251
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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