The author of the Last Policeman trilogy returns with a legal thriller that follows a teenager incapacitated by a routine surgery that went awry, sparking a lawsuit whose repercussions reverberate across time. A decade after the suit, lawyer Jay Shenk is hired once again by the boy's family—this time by his father, who is charged with the murder of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case.
The unconventional story structure is as intriguing as the concepts woven into the work. Ben H. Winters’ rich writing style and haunting storytelling will suit those who love novels that are hard to define and leave readers without a clear decisive finish, stories that speak to our deepest fears about the meaning of life and the nature of existence itself.
... a haunting work that sinks its hook into readers from the first page and never lets go, even after the story has ended. Author Ben H. Winters...stretches his considerable talent even further in this atmospheric, genre-blurring tale that is by turns mysterious, puzzling and ultimately frightening ... indeed a courtroom thriller, it is also a mystery and, in some very special ways, a hair-raising supernatural tale. The revelations concerning Wesley are chilling, to say the least, and literally turn the entire story on its head. Let’s just say that my inclination when finishing the book was to round up my children, all of whom are well into their adulthood, and hide them away. That happens when you read a novel with powerful plotting and characterization, and this one has it by the truckload.
Sad and surprising, The Quiet Boy crosses all manner of literary borders to capture these myriad lives ... there’s a lot of value in harnessing the tropes of one genre for use under the auspices of another. It’s one of the things that Winters is particularly good at, bringing together seemingly disparate elements with engaging seamlessness. It’s certainly the case here, with Winters taking the framework of the courtroom drama and introducing an assortment of differing flavors and ideas to create something different. And as the narratives progress, those new flavors ebb and flow—sometimes, everything seems rather straightforward, while at other points, things get … weird—subtly and not-so-subtly altering the landscape with abject smoothness, taking the reader along for the ride ... Winters sweeps us up without us even knowing we’ve been swept—it’s the kind of book you fall into, only to reemerge pages later wondering where the time went. Part of that immersion is born of the people we meet. Jay Shenk is a fascinating figure ... The Quiet Boy delights in its own mysteries, answering questions with other questions and endowing the proceedings with an entertaining opacity. It is a story of legal exploits, to be sure, but it also a story of fathers and sons, of the dual prices of pride and obsession and of the abstract nature of the self.
