A popular medical novel, the large economy size, in palpable prose which is as easy to read as the stop-and-start story moving in and out of Claremont Community Hospital (Chicago) with its assorted personnel and wives or lovers. There's an occasional patient, too--like Annie Reardon who wonders why her husband dies of emphysema in the ICU; there's a fair amount of clinical and institutional management--particularly the attempt to establish an HMO (most of the doctors around are engaged with blood diseases) clinic; there are some rare ones, like porphyria, and something about medication including the defective Pills which result in tragedy toward the end; there's an aging, perhaps incompetent doctor, a young student, and many more established in between; but primarily there's Holly--who lost a baby, who now worries about losing her husband to her not-so-good friend, and has further anxieties about her own hemophilia. Author Rickett doesn't connect her narrative as conveniently as she pairs off her characters, two by two, as if they were walking the plank into Noah's Ark but it is all quite passable as installment fiction. Which is, after all, what we're used to viewing.