Limited Time

The author of the acclaimed CJ Floyd mystery series (featuring an African-American bail bondsman and bounty hunter) takes a new direction with this shrewd and suspenseful medical thriller, in which both promising young athletes and celebrated medical researchers are mysteriously stricken. What connects the sudden illness of a Cuban boxer and the suspicion that a prominent Denver physician has been faking the results of his research experiments? What are the strange growths in the brain of a swimmer who dies while competing in an Olympic qualifying heat? Murder and malfeasance are afoot, apparently, in a university research laboratory, and pathologist-rancher Dr. Henry Bales needs to find the link before more deaths occur. CJ Floyd appears as a minor character in this novel, and fans of the series may miss his bracing presence. But Bales is an old friend of CJ's from their Vietnam days, and he is an appealing character in his own right (like the author, Bales is a pathologist at the University of Colorado). Greer ties up the threads of his subplots adroitly, and he is especially good at depicting the everyday life of a research lab and the ever-present tension there between applied and pure science. Agent, Nat Sobel. 6-city author tour. (Jan.) FYI: In 1998, Greer won the Chester Himes Award for his CJ Floyd mysteries.