This sequel is just what the doctor ordered and gives the budding franchise a shot of adrenaline.
A hospital’s controversial program puts a physician and his family in harm’s way.
It is a groan-worthy pun to say that Edwards’ (Final Mercy, 2013) Dr. Jack Forester sequel starts off with a bang. But the blast that rocks the New Canterbury Medical Center wounds 31, takes the life of Forester’s “teacher, mentor, friend, advisor, ally,” and sets in motion this thriller. At issue is something called the Gilchrist Tube Project. It is the hospital’s top priority, but the dead Dr. James Gavin had reservations about it. So does a biochemist, who shares these opinions with Forester at Gavin’s memorial service. “If something were to happen to me,” he confides, “I would want someone like you to know.” Not long after, the man is reported missing. It just so happens that he was the lover of the wife of the hospital’s new dean. She asks her friend Zellie, the former investigative reporter now married to Forester, to look into the matter (“You know how to dig into things”). Zellie finds that bad things happen to those who oppose the program and want to reveal its secrets. What is the Gilchrist Tube Project? Originally, it was “designed to return a woman’s fertility when her fallopian tubes are damaged.” To reveal how it will truly be used would be a spoiler, but what is a thriller without a “hidden agenda”? Meanwhile, the bomber, a drug-addicted war veteran, is in thrall to a shadowy organization that is determined to stop the implementation of the project at all costs. When, following the initial bombing, the hospital decides to proceed with the program, the group dispatches its soldier to help “give Satan and his servants a message they will never forget.” Within the framework of this well-sustained, suspenseful thriller, Edwards effectively examines issues of medical morality and ethics, corporate greed, and office politics. At one point, Forester tells Zellie why Gavin, “an old-fashioned idealist,” never liked the Gilchrist Tube Project: “Because it was being pushed so hard. And the funding sources weren’t transparent. That wasn’t how things should be.” While the appearance of sinister villains pulling the strings behind the scenes borders on cliché, other key players are empathetically fleshed out with motives that, while reprehensible, are true to their characters.
This sequel is just what the doctor ordered and gives the budding franchise a shot of adrenaline.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9890855-2-6
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Pascal Editions
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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