The Quiet Boy

By: Ben H. Winters

Narrated by: William DeMeritt

From the bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden State, this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time—and the team of lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake him up.

In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk—still in practice but a shell of his former self—is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness.

Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time.

The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.

Almost great

I think this one will make me think for a while and I might change my rating to a 5. Then again maybe it just approaches greatness with out quite making it over the summit Certainly worth your time and a credit.

Think twice

Even if you enjoyed his previous work I wouldn’t waste time on this book. I found it utterly unconvincing and poorly written. I hesitate to use the word verisimilitude in this context but it’s absent—both the legal and medical content of the book are thin. I can’t tell you why I decided to finish listening.

Very abrupt ending!

Liked the overall story and the narrator was great BUT the ending was very abrupt!! No real ending at all! Was very disappointing.

Another winner from Winters

Every book Winters writes is a new world, a new universe, from The Last Policeman (policeman investigating a murder while the world ends around him) to Underground Airlines (21st century America, where slavery still exists) to Golden State (an alternate or future California where the only thing that matters is absolute Truth). Every new world is similar to our own but different in some fundamental way.

The Quiet Boy, however, is simply our world, but with one inexplicable event - a teenage boy who, after a head injury and emergency surgery becomes something new, something completely unexplainable. The world is fascinated, but of course slowly loses interest. The people directly affected, however, will never be the same.

Couldn’t get into it

I only listened to the first 20 minutes, so my review may not be super valid. I guess if you don’t mind expletives in every other sentence, you might like this book. It was too excessive for me to continue.