Child abuse investigator Bo Bradley takes up the search for the family of a Native American boy, a quest that leads her to a multi-national medical company, where she uncovers a conspiracy of greed and murder.
From Publishers Weekly
Moonbird is a six-year-old boy whose future is at the heart of the latest in Padgett's increasingly compelling series featuring manic-depressive sleuth Bo Bradley. Bo meets Moonbird at Ghost Flower Lodge, a psychiatric rehabilitation facility run by the Neji Indians in the desert mountains of Southern California. The boy is there with his father, Mort Wagman, a single parent, aspiring comic and schizophrenic who had recently gone off his medications. Bo (seen last in Turtle Baby) is there climbing out of a deep depression that had been precipitated by the death of her 17-year-old dog.When Mort is shot to death in a nearby canyon, Bo is devastated, but her sympathy for the boy and her job as a social worker for the San Diego Child Protective Services give her impetus to investigate Mort's death and watch over his son, who will be moved into the child welfare system if no relatives are found. Bo, whose illness gives her an acute, reliable self-awareness, has become more forceful and credible with each of her four appearances. Padgett places her in a complex, well-orchestrated plot here, involving the greedy aspirations of a medical management corporation that hopes to franchise the Lodge's traditional Neji healing approach. Firmly rooted in Bo's unique interaction with the world, the narrative develops texture and depth as Padgett weaves strands of neurophysiological research, Indian ritual, murder, big business, WW II atrocities, family ties and romance (in the continuing relationship of Bo and pediatrician Andrew LaMarche) into a gripping novel. Mystery Guild featured alternate.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Sent reeling into a deep depression by the death of her beloved dog Mildred, San Diego Child Protective investigator Bo Bradley's not ready for any untoward excitement in her life. But when Mort Wagman, a volatile standup comic who's been her fellow patient at the Ghost Flower Lodge, is shot to death, it's Bo's job to find a guardian for his six-year-old son Bird, whose family tree has no other branches, and whose attention-deficit hyperactive disorder doesn't make him the world's best candidate for foster placement. On top of Bird's other problems, somebody may be trying to kill him--presumably the same somebody behind the disappearance of Old Ayma, another schizophrenic patient vanished from Ghost Flower Lodge--the same somebody who's taunting Bo, struggling as always with manic-depression, by sending her cruel reminders of Mildred and phoning her to play a yelping dog tape. The obvious culprits are the heavies at MedNet, corporate buccaneers plotting to wrest Ghost Flower Lodge away from the Kumeyaay Indians who founded it. But before Bo's done digging into Mort's past, she will have uncovered a motive more monstrous than either she or the bean-counters at MedNet can imagine. Padgett's fourth novel (Turtle Baby, 1995, etc.) spikes her usual formula--endangered child, tormented antiestablishment heroine, tentacular evil--with her finest, darkest mystery to date. No wonder Bo's so paranoid. -- Copyright ยฉ1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.