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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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