NOT THE BEST OF PLACES

Doctors at a state medical center resort to nefarious means to get rid of uncooperative fellow physicians in Quesenberry’s debut medical thriller.

Hematologist/oncologist Dr. Joe Parker, head of the Cancer Center, has evidently made a few enemies. Much of the animosity originates from Dr. Mike Frye, who undermines Joe by spreading rumors around the hospital. Now Joe’s boss sees Joe as a rival, and doctors don’t believe he is a team player. Dumping him, however, isn’t going to be easy since he excels at research and acquiring grants. Frye and his cronies try to sabotage a potential grant to undermine the oncologist. Meanwhile, Dr. Sal Amasi may have something incriminating on scientist Dr. Phillip Groth: a logbook with startling information. Groth sics a hired killer on Sal, but Joe and Sal may have a savior—another hit man, Tony Arms, who’s one of Joe’s cancer patients. The novel gives the medical-thriller genre a nice twist, putting doctors in more peril than their patients. However, the writing, while smart, occasionally sounds overly academic. Joe’s rounds, for instance, abound in unexplained medical jargon (“It involves low dose whole body irradiation, but at doses so low that you have little side effects. We then give you an IV injection of peripheral blood cells….It’s called a haplo-identical transplant”). The best plotlines are gruesome and/or tense: the various plots against Joe; a caretaker who fears for his life; and a couple of surprising deaths. And the revelation of the mysterious logbook’s contents may shock more than a few readers. Joe isn’t the most emotionally viable protagonist. There’s little indication of any feelings he has toward his patients, and his home life is virtually nonexistent (his wife, June, barely registers). Regardless, Joe and Sal garner sympathy since the doctors working against them are unmitigated villains with no clear reason for their hostility.

A remarkable thriller when not tripping over medicalese.