The focus of my blog is to review book series and not individual novels. But writers are going to continue writing novels within a series even after I have done my review, so I plan on reviewing the individual novels as they come into circulation.  Bette Golden Lamb and J.J. Lamb have recently added book #8, Bone Point to the Gina Mazzio series.

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Gina Mazzio is a nurse with an unbridled Bronx attitude and a knack at finding murderers. She actually doesn’t go looking for them, they just seem to find her wherever she goes. This time in Bone Point, the murderers turn up at a VA psychiatric hospital. Gina’s brother Vinnie is a veteran who suffers from PTSD and gets word that one of his fellow veterans and close friend, has recently died in a psychiatric hospital. Wanting to know the circumstances behind his friend’s death, Vinnie checks himself into the same psychiatric hospital known as Bone Point which results in him being heavily medicated and with no answers. Gina is not about to stand around idly while her brother is holed up in a psychiatric hospital, so she takes on a job as a nurse to snoop around and rescue her brother. What she finds is more than what she bargained for and could potentially endanger her unborn child.

With each of the Gina Mazzio novels, the Lambs usually focus on themes that deal with faults within our medical community such as the dangers of using robotic surgery or the illegal trade of body parts. In Bone Point the spotlight is on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and lack of help for veterans through Veterans Affairs. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a report earlier this year that indicated that half of the veterans that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and have PTSD were not getting appropriate care mainly because of lack of resources and the lack of informing veterans that benefits are available to them. In general, mental health facilities in the US are failing with fewer facilities available and sky rocketing costs making mental health treatment for a vast number of seriously mentally ill individuals unattainable.

I would say that Bone Point doesn’t quite have the thrills and chills compared to previous books in the series but is still an entertaining read. It could be read as a standalone but to get a better understanding of Mazzio and particularly her relationship to her husband Harry you might want to read the whole series.

To learn more about the series check out the Gina Mazzio series.