Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) book online

We’ve all had that moment: You see a face across a room and do a double take. For a brief second, you could swear it was your own reflection staring back at you. Encountering your double—a stranger who looks just like you—can be jarring even in the best of circumstances. But for Annabelle Schwartzman, the encounter isn’t at a party or in the grocery store. That unsettlingly familiar face that’s looking blankly at her belongs to a corpse on her examining table. 

As I read Danielle Girard’s forensic thriller Exhume, I feared for Annabelle. Seven years after leaving her abusive ex, she’s buried her past and settled into her life as a medical examiner in San Francisco. But then she’s confronted by the sickening familiarity of this dead body. The woman on her table doesn’t just look like Annabelle; the victim’s life mirrors the life Annabelle was sure she left behind. 

Following in the footsteps of Kathy Reichs’s Temperance “Bones” Brennan and Tess Gerritsen’s Maura Isles, Annabelle is a well-drawn character who is driven by a passion for her work and justice for the victims she encounters. I gasped more than once when reading this book—a testament to Danielle Girard’s ability to deliver a story that surprised me and create characters about whom I cared deeply. 

A taut and suspenseful thriller that kept me turning pages until the very end, Exhume uncovers the pains and triumphs of obsession, love, and life.