In a first hardcover medical-thriller, Goldberg (a clinical professor at UCLA Medical Center) gives HMOs rough treatment while concocting a scalpel-edged page-turner. Heroine Dr. Joanna Blalock, a Los Angeles pathologist (also featured in the earlier paperbacks Deadly Medicine and A Deadly Practice), is back at Memorial Hospital, where a recent outcropping of Legionnaires' disease had flooded her dissecting rooms with an overflow of coroner's cases. Suddenly three more appear: two bone- marrow transplants and one breast cancer—the bodies of patients who died unexpectedly of unknown causes just as they entered Memorial for treatment. Even though her dissections, resections, and cell and blood analyses draw blanks, Joanna smells murder. Meanwhile, readers will find E.R.'s visuals light stuff beside Goldberg's knowing corpse-cutting, popping out of inner organs, and poison-seeking. We are also well aware that a monster is loose in the form of Karl Rimer, a Vietnam-trained assassin who now works for the Agency—and does outside jobs as well, as he is doing in L.A. Joanna's affair with homicide detective Jake Sinclair is fading badly, even though their paths cross often in the investigation. Slowly, the reader, if not the two leads, comes to suspect that Health First, an HMO that sent these three failing patients to Memorial, is somehow behind the murders. The burgeoning Health First is masterminded by Dr. Robert Mariner, a now middle- aged boy genius reminiscent of Jonathan Winters's cemetery owner in The Loved One, who complains, ``What are all these stiffs doing on my property?'' When Joanna gets too close to the truth, Rimer sets out to remove her, forcing her car over a cliff. Joanna survives, though, an amnesiac pursued by a murderer when she doesn't even know who she is. . . . Cool cuttings by a sure hand.
Pub Date: March 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94092-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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
BOOK REVIEW
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