FRAMED

In Grayhall’s novel, an intrepid physician takes on petrochemical corporations polluting her patients’ air.

Victoria “Tori” Nelson seems to have it all. Educated at Boston University and Harvard Medical School, Tori has a career that has boasted one achievement after another—she has now landed at a clinic in Houston where she sees patients and pursues her medical research, learning all she can about environmental factors causing an uptick of diseases in her area. Tori soon finds herself on the cusp of publishing groundbreaking findings that will scientifically prove that petrochemical giants have been polluting the air and causing unprecedented rates of cancer, along with a myriad of other serious (and often terminal) illnesses. Tori’s former college roommate, Jo, now an environmental attorney, is in on this too, as her firm is set to represent plaintiffs trying to hold the corporations to account. As Jo makes her way to Houston, Tori is confronted by her medical director—who is clearly beholden to the oil companies—and told to stop filing insurance claims on behalf of her patients. Back in her office, Tori is called down to the lobby to meet two FBI agents who’ve come to arrest her, informing Tori she’s a suspect in a bank robbery case. As she reels from this accusation and tries to remain steadfast in her work and research, readers learn that Tori’s harboring her own secrets about her crumbling marriage and a mysterious new friend named Jude. In some senses, Grayhall’s novel will feel familiar to readers as Tori takes on the Goliath of capitalism as it puts the squeeze on everyone and everything in her life. The calculus here is simple (“It’s not only me,” Jo says to Tori, “thinking that you might have been framed for the bank robbery. And that your cancer study and whatever information you’re getting that you can’t tell me about threatens Big Oil because they’re worried about being exposed as environmental criminals”), but Grayhall’s smooth, easy prose and the manner in which the two women navigate the shifting landscape of their friendship amid the accusations and secrets will keep readers rapt.

A taut rendering of one woman’s fight against Big Oil.