Act of Avarice

Doc Brady has made the move to Horseshoe Bay and is enjoying a reduced work schedule that affords him the luxury of working four days a week: two in surgery and two in his clinic. Friday and Saturday are golf days, and Sunday is reserved for whatever Mary Louise, his adored wife, wants to do.

On one particular Friday, Brady is in the parking lot of the HEB when he witnesses a vintage Rolls Royce slowly crunch into a parked truck. The driver of the Rolls is slumped in his seat. Brady tells an observer to call 911 while he performs CPR. Even though the EMTs arrive quickly, the gentleman dies at the hospital.

The man who passes is Sanford Lowell III, a wealthy member of an oil and gas family who is Hill Country Medical Center's largest donor. In his will, he leaves over $150 million to the hospital. However, the will gets contested by the mother of an intellectually disabled woman who is purported to be Sandy Lowell's child from an affair years ago. To complicate matters, the pathologist discovers at autopsy that Lowell was completely healthy before his death. And shortly thereafter, the lawyer representing Lowell's interests dies suddenly, in exactly the same way.

Brady finds himself involved in trying to solve these mysteries, as he always seems to do. But once he finds out that Lowell may have been poisoned by medications used for cosmetic surgery, and that his own wife is a patient as well, he pulls out the stops to get to the bottom of the problem. Was Sandy Lowell poisoned? Was his lawyer? And is there enough money at stake that someone would murder two people as an act of avarice?