cover image Blood Lies

Blood Lies

Daniel Kalla, . . Forge, $24.95 (317pp) ISBN 978-0-765-31832-9

F ans of intelligent contemporary whodunits who enjoyed Scott Turow’s debut, Presumed Innocent , will find welcome echoes of that modern classic in the fourth novel from Canadian author Kalla (Rage Therapy ), who’s also an ER physician. When drug addict Emily Kenmore is found with her neck slashed in her Seattle condo, Ben Dafoe, a doctor at a local hospital who’s worked as a police consultant, chooses not to tell the cops that he was once secretly engaged to Emily or that he had threatened the unidentified dead man found with her for supplying her habit. The discovery of Dafoe’s rare blood type at the scene of the double homicide prompts him to flee to Canada, in search of his twin brother, Aaron, a chronic drug user who shares the same blood type. Dafoe had believed Aaron had been dead for two years, but now suspects he’s still alive. The twists are well done, and Kalla has a gift rare in the thriller field for creating sympathetic characters. (June)