Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Coded Justice: A Thriller by Stacey Abrams

 

I was fortunate enough to receive via NetGalley a review copy of Coded Justice by Stacey Abrams (Doubleday, 15 July 2025), the third thriller from political leader and entrepreneur Stacey Abrams featuring lawyer Avery Keene. Keene is now working as a private investigator for a law firm that specializes in helping their clients identify their risk exposure, legal speak for finding their problems before the regulatory agencies do. Keene is tasked to investigate an accidental death in a highly touted health care artificial intelligence company that is poised to go public in a blaze of publicity and money.

Rafael Diaz has transformed his military experience and his concern for the subpar health care veterans receive into an innovative suite of technology tools to support both the veteran and the medical staff caring for them. A key feature is the ability to adjust for innate treatment biases involving race and gender, known issues in medical care. After deploying the system for trial use in a clinic in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the IPO paperwork is being finalized when a series of odd but dangerous errors in diagnoses and pharmaceuticals are identified along with a failure in the office HVAC system that results in the death of a key employee.

An interesting change from the legal settings of the earlier books, this one has an involved plot from both medical and technical perspectives. The unequal amounts of IT knowledge across readers required lengthy data dumps to ensure understanding of the issues at play. I found the story an absorbing mix of insider details on corporate start-ups, the VA health care system, and potential applications of artificial intelligence. It includes more than one swipe at the health records system in use by the military, electronic and otherwise, something I know about through my work.

I quickly realized “coded” in the title has more than one meaning. While it references software programming, it also means the differentiation of medical diagnosis and treatment based on race and gender. The patient is classified (coded) based on race and gender, and treatment decisions are based on that code. Then one of the engineers mentions code switching, changing behavior to match the social context of a situation. All three definitions apply here.

One error I noted which I hope will be corrected in the final release: Early in the book the AI system states someone has a hyperthyroid condition which is likely the cause of his recent weight gain. An overactive thyroid (hyper) causes weight loss, not weight gain. An underactive thyroid (hypo) causes weight gain.

A techno thriller rather than a legal thriller, Coded Justice makes a compelling case for the need to legislate and manage AI as well as the long-known need to improve medical care for veterans.

Starred review from Booklist.

 

·         Publisher: Doubleday

·         Publication date: July 15, 2025

·         Language: English

·         Print length: 432 pages

·         ISBN-10: 0385548346

·         ISBN-13: 978-0385548342

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3ImCLPt

 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Crime Watch: Review: CHARCOAL JOE

Crime Watch: Review: CHARCOAL JOE: CHARCOAL JOE by Walter Mosley (Doubleday, 2016) Reviewed by Shane Donald Picking up where Rose Gold left off in LA in the late 1960s,...

Guest Reviewer Larry W. Chavis: "I Have Nothing to Say.' (The Reckoning by John Grisham)

Well, it has been quite awhile, but Larry W. Chavis is finally back on the blog today with another review. After you read the below regarding the new one by John Grisham, make sure you go check out his review of the 2016 Bouchercon Anthology, Blood on the Bayou. I keep telling Larry he is good at this reviewing thing and ought to keep at it. I hope he does.

"I Have Nothing to Say.'

The Reckoning by John Grisham

New York, Doubleday

October 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-385-54415-3 (hardcover)

           978-0-385-54416-0 (ebook)

Reviewed by Larry W. Chavis

At the end of 1945, Pete Banning returned home to the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, a bona fide war hero. Captured by the Japanese forces who had forced the American and Filipino defenders, starving and with no hope of reinforcement, to surrender, Pete survived the horrors of the Bataan Death March, and the even-more-unspeakable nightmares of prison camp, to escape and fight for three years as a guerilla in the mountains of Luzon. His family, notified after the fall of the Philippines of his missing-and-presumed-dead status, ecstatically welcomed him home to his ancestral farmlands. A happy ending for everyone.

Until the chilly morning of October 9, 1946, when Pete Banning rose early, walked to his sister's neighboring acreage to have breakfast with her, then calmly drove into Clanton, strode into the Methodist preacher's office, that of his friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell, and shot him three times, twice in the chest and once in the head. Exiting the pastor's study, Banning told the church caretaker to fetch the sheriff, and then drove home to await his arrest. To the sheriff, to his attorney, to his family, Banning made one statement: "I have nothing to say."

The first chapter of John Grisham's latest book sets the stage for what may be his most perplexing novel yet. Not that the underlying motive is so perplexing—in fact, when it is revealed in the final pages, it may be a bit of a let-down—but that Pete Banning is not only willing to commit murder and set loose an avalanche of uncertain and possibly dire consequences on his family, the victim's family, his farm hands and their families, even all of Ford County, without uttering so much as a syllable of the reason for it. Pete's obstinate refusal to speak could, perhaps, be viewed as the actions of principled character acting on his principles. It could also be taken as the narcissistic action of a man who will unleash, at the very least, waves of anxiety and fear on those closest to him with never a care for what he is doing to them. The reader is left to determine which, and it is not so easy to do.

Being a John Grisham book, race and the legal system play prominent roles, the legal system's corruptible and very flawed processes on display, the racial inequities present in 1946 Mississippi differing in degree, if not so much in kind, from those that still plague society. There are two trials in the book, criminal and civil, written with Grisham's ability to highlight a system that, like Diogenes, seeks for truth and honesty. One is left to wonder whether and how often these things are found. The Reckoning is worth reading and is a book to make one think. It is not a book to make one happy.

Larry W. Chavis ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Big Thaw by Donald Harstad

The Big Thaw by Donald Harstad (Doubleday, 2000) is the third in the Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman series, six police procedurals set in rural Nation County, Iowa. It’s January with at least a foot of snow on the ground and the temperature has been below zero for so long everyone thinks their thermometers are broken. Carl is rousted out of bed to help chase a burglary suspect who slides off the icy road into a ditch. Once extracted from his wrecked car, the police recognize Fred Grothier who is known to be guilty of a range of minor crimes. Questioning reveals he and his cousins are the perpetrators of a string of recent break-ins, visiting the empty homes of residents who found a warmer place to spend the winter. Fred startles Carl and his colleagues when Fred tells them he was driving around looking for his cousins, who have disappeared. Fred dropped them off at a home whose owners were known to be out of town but the cousins were not there when he returned to pick them up with their loot.

Carl and a couple more from the sheriff’s office go to the house in question and search it from top to bottom. The frozen bodies of the cousins are found under a tarp in a tool shed, shot execution-style with Russian automatics. Russian weapons are not all that common in Nation County, where the U.S.-made shotgun and rifle are the usual guns of choice. The entire sheriff’s office is mulling over this strange turn of events when some of the state FBI agents show up. The simmering rivalry between the local boys and the FBI know-it-alls flares up, and a convoluted but fast-moving story unfolds.

Harstad was a deputy sheriff for more than 25 years and it shows in the precise and exhaustive description of crime scene investigations. Similar to the Jake Hines titles by Elizabeth Gunn and the Posadas County books by Steven Havill, this series balances the personal lives of the characters with authentic police work in a rural setting where there are never enough law enforcement personnel to go around. Highly recommended.

·         Hardcover: 368 pages

·         Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (August 15, 2000)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0385495692

·         ISBN-13: 978-0385495691

Aubrey Hamilton © 2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal IT projects by day and reads mysteries at night.