Book Review: First the Dead by Tim Downs

The third book chronicling the adventures of forensic entomologist Dr. Nick Polchak, First the Dead is set in New Orleans during and just after Hurricane Katrina. Author Tim Downs draws a convincing portrait of the devastated city and the tireless rescue workers braving horrifying conditions to bring in the last the survivors of the storm.

Polchak and his friend Jerry Kibbee are part of a team that usually arrives in the wake of a disaster to process and identify the dead. Deployed to a small town outside New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hits, the team is told in no uncertain terms that they must set aside their usual work and spend the first few days of Katrina’s aftermath in rescue work: “first the living” is to be their temporary new mantra.

Polchak, a brilliant and driven scientist, believes that someone is using the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward to hide a series of murders. He is convinced that all forensic evidence of these murders will be lost before his team can recover it. With the help of his easy-going friend Jerry and J.T., a young African-American boy they rescue from roof on their first day in the Lower Ninth Ward, Polchak sets out to find and preserve the evidence. He soon finds himself the target of the killer.

Downs’ descriptions of the destruction wrought by Katrina are compelling. On the first day the Lower Ninth Ward is nearly deserted as Polchak steers his small boat down inundated streets and alleys. Families too large to fit into his craft choose to stay on their griddle-hot roofs rather than risk being separated. His boat gets hung up in tree branches.

At one point Polchak makes use of a flooded hospital lab. “In the doorway he stopped and looked back. The scene was utterly surreal: a medical laboratory half filled with water and a fishing boat floating in the center. Beyond the boat was a window with no glass; outside the window was an endless black lake.”

The search for J.T.’s father takes them to the Superdome, which is being used as an emergency shelter. “...the air reeked of sweat, and feces, and rotting food. The stench was nauseating...The noise was nearly deafening, and the buses only made it worse.”

At one point Polchak is trapped in a flooded house. “The lukewarm water was choked with particulate matter swirling around him like leaves on a windy day; he clutched at the largest pieces and felt nothing but clumps of soggy cardboard and waterlogged wood.”

Downs also does a great job of showcasing the chaos endured by the rescue workers in the first days after the storm. He immerses the reader in the military-issue “meals ready to eat” that the hungry J.T. devours. Polchak and his sidekicks sleep in an air-conditioned morgue truck to escape the oppressive heat and humidity. They scrounge rides in emergency supply trucks and hide their rescue boat to keep it safe from thieves and looters. Cell phones don’t work, patients die in the upper floors of hospitals because their life-support machines have no power, and nobody seems to be in charge.

It’s this lack of leadership that compels Polchak to reject the idea of “first the living,” and it’s this same vacuum that lets him get away with his renegade behavior. Like many brilliant scientist characters, Polchak comes off as a cold, distant wise-cracker. His few moments of warmth are short-lived, and he’s not a character who I want to spend a lot of time with.

Another character in the book, psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Woodbridge, was sometimes Polchak’s foe and sometimes his friend, sometimes his superior and sometimes his partner. Although there was the hint of a romantic relationship there, I found myself wondering why any woman as together as Woodbridge would bother with someone as maddening as Polchak.

What made this book a success for me were the challenges Polchak had to overcome to keep his investigation going and his genial entourage. I didn’t ultimately care very much about what happened to Polchak or his precious evidence; but I did want to follow the stories of easy-going Jerry and bright and courageous young J.T.

This is the third book in a series, and given my reluctance to spend time with the main character, I’m uncertain if I’ll go back to explore the first two.