UNNATURAL CAUSES

Emergency room technician Robinson takes Dr. Evelyn “Ev” Sutcliffe (Blood Run, 1988, etc.) back to her home ER at Manhattan’s University Hospital. Robinson’s brilliant grip on adrenaline-charged ER procedure has always outshone her plots, which have run from the soapy to formulaic (Ev herself is a self-diagnosed adrenaline junkie). This time around, three or four story lines include a merger threat: University, losing six million yearly, is wooing two potential merger partners, Mount Scopus Hospital and St. Eustace, and the fear is that University will be made an outpatient hospital to get it back on a paying basis. Will the nurses stage a walkout? More immediately important, when Ev lends her apartment to dear friend Gary Seligman, RN, someone mixes deadly Death Cap mushrooms into a batch of Portobelo mushrooms Gary is frying up for a dinner party with his beloved Alan. Who would do such a thing—and why? Were the mushrooms intended for Ev herself? An investigation is headed by fortyish Harrison Ford ringer, Detective First Grade Richard Ost, NYPD, whom Ev has traded wits with many times before. Suspects? There are Scott Renfrew and Mark Ramsey, who live apart though each has the key to the other’s apartment and car, and who look and dress so much alike they’re often mistaken for one another. Does one of them have something vile to hide? And there’s Ev’s lover, Dr. Phil Carchiollo, who has his own personal stalker: he’s pursued relentlessly by beautiful erotomaniac Elise, who not only has a way of turning up in Phil’s bed in Ev’s nightgown but thinks she deserves to be there. Elise, it happens, once stalked poisons expert Dr. Held, Id who lectured on—mushrooms . . . Robinson keeps the pot boiling, though after the obligatory violent climax, a long spelling out of motives drains the story’s windup. Still, the best in this series, with plenty of moments of hammering energy.