A nightmare scenario of an insurance industry run amok that makes for often entertaining—and troubling—reading.
A hotshot hedge fund manager uncovers an insurance industry conspiracy in this gripping medical thriller.
A car accident sends Fort Myers, Florida, investment whiz Warren Thompson and his fiancee, Alex, to the hospital. Warren recovers quickly, but Alex succumbs to an infection and dies. Consumed by grief, he wonders whether the hospital staff did everything possible to save her. Staffers meet his pointed inquiries with ominous warnings not to look too closely at how treatment decisions are made. But Warren’s stubborn amateur sleuthing eventually leads him to the realization that USCare, the supposedly universal insurance program that’s a successor to the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t provide equal treatment for all. The wealthy are virtually guaranteed to receive the highest level of medical attention, while people on the lowest rungs of the insurance ladder would, according to one Harvard-educated doctor, “get better care at a Days Inn with a bottle of aspirin.” It turns out that physicians who deviate from the strict care guidelines are blackballed. Warren moves to sue insurance companies and expose the truth, but they’re willing to go to extremes to protect their business. Bollinger (The Pill Game, 2014, etc.) makes a few short leaps from the current real-life state of health care and insurance in America to create a sadly believable reality in which big business has nearly complete control over treatment decisions. Warren starts out as a self-absorbed businessman but evolves into an appealing protagonist as he learns to care about things other than making money. The supporting cast members are well-drawn, including Micah, a helpful nurse (and later, Warren’s love interest), and Sam Abrams, a “hippie doc” whose attempts to expose the truth about USCare cost him his career. However, the insurance industry villains are standard-issue bad guys in suits. The prose is also sometimes a bit verbose; trimmer sentences and paragraphs would have made this story zip along even faster. However, Bollinger delivers a clever, satisfying conclusion.
A nightmare scenario of an insurance industry run amok that makes for often entertaining—and troubling—reading.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9848432-6-8
Page Count: 362
Publisher: JNB Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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