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 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.

Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time.

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.