KILL OR CURE

A fast-moving, high-tension sixth adventure for New Haven's Edwina Crusoe (Desperate Remedy, 1993, etc.)—nurse, heiress, and mother of two-year-old twins—whose one-woman agency investigates medically related cases. This time, Edwina's longtime lawyer friend Ed Chernoff has asked for help exploring the background of Dr. William Granger, a promising surgeon on the staff of Edwina's old stamping ground—Chelsea Memorial Hospital. Granger had seemingly gone berserk in the emergency room, killing two people, one of them his wife Charity, and wounding teenager Gerry Bailey, who was already suffering near-catatonic shock and a gunshot wound, source unknown. Chernoff and consulting psychiatrist Freida Schreiber are planning a multiple-personality-disorder defense, underwritten, strangely enough, by Charity's rich parents. Between intervals with police detective husband Martin, her frosty, formidable mother Harriet—at the family manse in Litchfield—and Rita, her relentlessly hip babysitter, Edwina manages to ferret out Granger's scary past and stimulate Gerry Bailey's overwhelmed mother to action—saving her son and incidentally solving the disappearance of his pal Tad Conway. The pace is hardly slowed by reams of psychobabble and a profusion of subplots, all leading to the final killing that wraps up Edwina's solution. But readers who can overlook heavy coincidence and lightweight motivation will have a gripping good time with this one.