A cleverly crafted, suspenseful yarn built around the volatile nature of medicine and malfeasance.
A troubled physician becomes the scapegoat for a nefarious exploitation plot.
This debut medical thriller opens with the revenge murder of attorney Carl Hafen, with the events leading up to that homicide forming the thrust of the story. Jack Andrews, a 40-year-old longtime anesthesiologist, becomes inexplicably embroiled in a wrongful death lawsuit and a pawn in a larger scheme to frame him for malpractice. Andrews’ personal life has seen better days: his marriage to wife Kate, a relentlessly manipulative bully, has soured despite two daughters whom he adores. A regular at the local shooting range, he finds his escape with target practice and big game hunting. Things go from bad to worse when, after a routine stomach surgery, a patient dies under Andrews’ postoperative care. Despite multiple attempts at life-preserving medical intervention, Andrews is pegged as the negligent physician by his contemporaries. A malpractice suit ensues, spearheaded by Hafen, who takes advantage of the doctor’s interpersonal vulnerability and good nature and skewers him during a deposition. Trouble mounts further when Andrews’ wife files for divorce, seeking primary custody of their daughters, and he loses the malpractice trial and must pay substantial monetary damages. In a dramatic turn of events, Andrews becomes bent on revenge. An unhinged man with a now-destroyed reputation, he angrily morphs into a vigilante for justice and begins viciously and systematically stalking and targeting those who conspired against him in the trial in a calculated display of retribution. Veldt, a veteran operating room physician, exhibits a grand command of clinical terminology and hospital protocol (“Morbidity and mortality conferences are a universal exercise in all medical centers. These rounds feature frank discussions concerning what caused, or is thought to have caused, a particular patient’s poor results”). This sets the stage for an impressively written, fast-paced, graphically depicted hospital melodrama. His deft narrative includes the dogged sleuthing of a seasoned homicide detective seeking to stop Andrews. The investigator searches for hard evidence against a slick hero who declares himself merely “a product of the system.”
A cleverly crafted, suspenseful yarn built around the volatile nature of medicine and malfeasance.Pub Date: July 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5029-1340-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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