The Gene Police

In Light’s thought-provoking third mystery featuring attorney Shep Harrington (after 2003’s Chain Thinking), Shep’s Virginia state trooper friend, Reggie Mason, comes to him with a problem. On the behalf of his Aunt Betty, Reggie has done a search in the state DNA database to see whether the child Betty bore at Sweetwater Hospital in 1953, John Mason Langard, whom the doctors told her died at birth, is in fact alive. Reggie found a match for Langard, but it connects his cousin with the recent murder of 78-year-old photographer Jennifer Rice. At the victim’s house, Reggie discovered a 50-year-old photo taken at Shep’s home in rural Lyle, Va., which back then was a poor farm. The photo could have relevance to the murder case—and the fate of Betty’s son. Shep agrees to try to find out who took Langard as a baby and why. In the process, he learns that Sweetwater was run at the time by a prominent eugenicist, who shared Nazi beliefs about race. Light’s timely look at an almost forgotten dark chapter of recent American history, when doctors experimented on those considered racially inferior, more than compensates for the routine mystery. (May)