A debut effort that’s ambitious in scope but often limited by its unsteady execution.
In Janson’s (The Child in Our Hearts, 2012, etc.) first mystery, a pediatrician sued for malpractice finds himself at the epicenter of a far-reaching conspiracy.
Eastern Kentucky native Joe Nelson owes his medicine practice to a fortuitous accident: In his youth, he was a coal miner, and a roof collapse during a routine excavation left him trapped. Thanks to a courageous, quick-thinking doctor, Joe made it out—as an amputee, albeit, but still alive. Years later, he has paid that salvation forward by pursuing a career in pediatrics. All is well until 4-year-old Linda Murphy dies in his care, and the toxicologist’s report reveals an overdose of Lidocaine as the cause of death. Joe’s insistence that he provided the correct dosage pales in the face of a malpractice suit brought on by Linda Murphy’s extremely wealthy, powerful family. With his questionably competent defense attorney, an imminent but strangely amicable divorce from his wife, a blossoming romance and a determination to uncover the true circumstances of Linda’s death, Joe has his hands full. Snooping into medical records and investigating potential profiteers earns him enemies on all sides—the hospital, the courts, even the local police force—and sets into motion a race against time. Regrettably, the mystery at the heart of the novel is bordered by clumsy, often distracting syntax: “The server was there almost immediately as if he had been waiting for them to be ready to order, which he probably had been.” As often as the story hits its stride, it is mired by awkward turns of phrase, repetition—“The grounds were kept and lit well…They arrived at the plaque at the center of a well-lit area”—and bland dialogue. Janson’s experience as a physician shines through in the clinically written sections, particularly the court proceedings and explanations of medical procedures, which are professional, articulate and deftly handled. While the grand reveal satisfactorily ties numerous loose ends together, it’s diluted by its predictability; astute readers will likely guess (or at least suspect) the criminal mastermind a quarter of the way into the book.
A debut effort that’s ambitious in scope but often limited by its unsteady execution.Pub Date: March 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988515727
Page Count: 238
Publisher: SDP Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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