Enthralling medical procedural with real depth and pathos.
In Foster’s intense hospital thriller, a hard-pressed emergency room doctor copes with medical crises, malevolent bureaucrats and vicious gangbangers.
There’s so much excitement in the ordinary workings of a hospital emergency room that a plot is hardly necessary to hold readers' interest in the doings of Dr. Alex Randolph, chief of emergency medicine at the for-profit Mason-Dixon Regional Medical Center in rural Maryland. Confronting him every day are strokes, heart attacks and trauma cases where a minute’s delay in treatment can spell the difference between life and death. There are floods of school children with colds—but hidden among them could be a kid whose lethargy and runny nose signal a deadly case of meningitis. There are scammers faking back pain to score a Percocet scrip and, more ominously, a sudden rash of heroin overdoses. Then into the ER walks Julio, a wounded chieftain of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, accompanied by three stony, snarling thugs; their arrival heralds a drug war that will put the ER staff in the crossfire. Alex has an off-duty life and a tepid romance with a nurse, but the hospital is the novel’s magnetic center. Foster, himself an ER doctor, writes with a lucid, supple prose that illuminates the physician’s art while bringing out the human drama that entwines it. He skillfully evokes the barely controlled chaos and high-wire camaraderie of the ER and regales readers with intricate, absorbing accounts of the struggle to stabilize, diagnose and treat patients under extreme pressure. Alex is an engaging guide to this scene; outwardly he’s a Dr. Jekyll oozing polite concern, inwardly he’s a Mr. Hyde seething at slackers, addicts, parents who neglect their kids and the corporate executives at Mason-Dixon who care more about pushing paper and fighting turf battles than they do about patients. On its way to a riveting climax, Alex’s saga gives us a vivid dispatch from the front lines of American medicine.
Enthralling medical procedural with real depth and pathos.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615493886
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Macdougall
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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