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FIRST CUT

Name: FIRST CUT
Author: Leah Ruth Robinson
ISBN: 0-380-79458-4

by Leah Ruth Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1997

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Forced and furiously complicated second in a series of medical procedurals starring brainy, sexy, ``adrenaline junky'' Manhattan emergency-room physician Evelyn Sutcliffe. Starting with the same premise as in her debut novel, Blood Run (1988), Robinson has Dr. Sutcliffe fail to save a female victim of apparent male aggression. Theresa Kahr, a young German national who works in a boutique and volunteers at a neighborhood abortion clinic, is wheeled into the University Hospital ER having been bludgeoned almost to death with a pipe. Worse yet, her attacker crudely violated her with a toy doll, identifying her as one more victim of the serial killer dubbed by newspapers as Babydoll. A hectic parade follows, involving emergency-room details, capsule portraits of personnel, cops, Dr. Sutcliffe's previous and possible lovers, and Lisa Chiu, a sympathetically rendered polyracial feminist lesbian ER tech who looks upon the thirtysomething Sutcliffe as a mentor. It's no surprise, then, that Chiu is Babydoll's next victim. Sutcliffe suspects that the murders have something to do with a series of fanatical attacks on abortion- clinic staffers. Frustrated by the slow pace of the police investigation (``You've been watching too much `Murder, She Wrote,' '' an NYPD detective chides her), Sutcliffe pokes into Chiu's background, discovering that she had information about a Medicaid scam involving Sutcliffe's ER. This sets off a series of squeamish speculations as Sutcliffe wonders about the dirty secrets her colleagues might be hiding. More corpses arrive and, as if on cue, Babydoll starts stalking Sutcliffe, forcing her into the arms of lovers, confidantes, and mentors whom (almost too late) she learns that she shouldn't have trusted. Arising from a pile of red herrings, Babydoll finally dukes it out with Sutcliffe, who- -refreshingly—is horrified at the de rigueur violence such climaxes demand. Competent medical lore and compassionately detailed minor players are dampened by soap operatics and a trite, formulaic plot. (First printing of 125,000; $200,000 ad/promo)

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-380-79458-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.