Clay Gardner and Joey Chancey are best friends, even they’re as different as the proverbial night and day. Clay is poor. Joey is rich, or at least upper middle class. Clay works at the hospital to earn a little money to keep heart and soul together; Joey has no job but a very active social life. Clay’s family consists of a dead mother, a distant and cold father, and a sister who’s busy builiding her own life in another state. Joey has a close and loving family. Clay wants to become a doctor, but doesn’t have the money to even enter college in the fall. Joey, the class valedictorian and football hero, is planning to go to Duke in the fall.

When Clay gets off work and finds Joey in their clubhouse, naked and wielding a weapon with intent to do bodily harm to Clay or anybody else who gets close, he can hardly believe it’s happening. But it does happen, and Clay must find out what’s wrong with Joey, how he changed from a competent, ambitious, friendly high school graduate to a psychotic mess on the critical list at the hospital. And everyone thinks it’s Clay’s fault somehow. It all makes for a great mystery with a message that’s never preachy or heavy-handed.

Surprisingly, author S.A. Harazin is a woman. I found this fact surprising because Blood Brothers is such a very male book. The narrator and protagonist, Clay, is a guy. His thoughts are guy thoughts. I don’t know how Ms. Harazin made me feel as if I’d climbed inside a male brain when I read this book, but she did. And that’s some accomplishment for a “chick”.

Also, Ms. Harazin’s background and experience in nursing shows. Having spent a lot of time in emergency rooms myself lately (with my parents), I recognize some of the atmosphere that pervades Clay’s workplace. And I figure the author gets the details and the ambience right since some of it feels so familiar.

Some violence and crude language, but not too overpowering. Good for young adult girls. Great for young adult guys.