bookshelf

SANGUINITY POINT

Name: SANGUINITY POINT
Author: Peter Palmieri
ISBN: 978-1-973537-23-6

by Peter Palmieri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 14, 2017

A fast-paced medical thriller not entirely sabotaged by theatrically overwrought prose.

bookshelf

A publicly disgraced doctor attempts to piece together a new career and finds himself inadvertently drawn into the world of organized crime.

Dr. Benjamin Snow has a promising future; armed with an impressive academic pedigree, he’s a pediatric fellow at a prestigious Houston hospital. However, his dreams are suddenly shattered when Mr. Tepal, distraught over the hopeless condition of his “brain-dead child,” puts a gun to Benjamin’s head and orders that that he pull the boy off life support. Benjamin obliges and, in the aftermath, is cruelly hounded by sensationalist media who dub him “Young Doctor Death.” He loses his fellowship as a result of the negative publicity, though it’s never clear why anyone would hold him responsible under such extraordinary duress. (An aggressive police detective questions him zealously, confusingly accusing him of hoplophobia, a “morbid fear of firearms,” for not grabbing Mr. Tepal’s gun.) Benjamin is professionally banished to a job in Purgatory, Texas—Palmieri (The Art of Forgetting, 2013) displays an impressive breadth of literary talents in this medical thriller, but nuance isn’t one of them. Benjamin is bewildered by his new employer’s extraordinary financial success, especially given the poverty of its surrounding area. He becomes concerned about the relentless focus on profit at the practice and discovers that a nurse turned up dead after accusing one of its cardiologists of performing unnecessary surgeries. But when two of his colleagues suddenly die—and Benjamin stumbles on evidence of doctors’ connections to the drug trafficking underworld—he fearfully wonders what exactly he signed up for. The author packs the story with all the right ingredients: artfully crafted suspense, a morally complex protagonist, and a generous portion of action skillfully described. However, those virtues are often undermined by hokey or soap opera–ish melodrama. At one point, Benjamin’s boss, Dr. Soto-Prinz, brandishing a “Spanish conquistador dagger,” menacingly orders him to eat charcuterie, a clumsy way of revealing his despotic character. The novel remains an enjoyably easy read as long as one doesn't take it too seriously.

A fast-paced medical thriller not entirely sabotaged by theatrically overwrought prose.

Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-973537-23-6

Page Count: 402

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

MARCH

by Geraldine Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2005

The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.

bookshelf

Brooks combines her penchant for historical fiction (Year of Wonders, 2001, etc.) with the literary-reinvention genre as she imagines the Civil War from the viewpoint of Little Women’s Mr. March (a stand-in for Bronson Alcott).

In 1861, John March, a Union chaplain, writes to his family from Virginia, where he finds himself at an estate he remembers from his much earlier life. He’d come there as a young peddler and become a guest of the master, Mr. Clement, whom he initially admired for his culture and love of books. Then Clement discovered that March, with help from the light-skinned, lovely, and surprisingly educated house slave Grace, was teaching a slave child to read. The seeds of abolitionism were planted as March watched his would-be mentor beat Grace with cold mercilessness. When March’s unit makes camp in the now ruined estate, he finds Grace still there, nursing Clement, who is revealed to be, gasp, her father. Although drawn to Grace, March is true to his wife Marmee, and the story flashes back to their life together in Concord. Friends of Emerson and Thoreau, the pair became active in the Underground Railroad and raised their four daughters in wealth until March lost all his money in a scheme of John Brown’s. Now in the war-torn South, March finds himself embroiled in another scheme doomed to financial failure when his superiors order him to minister to the “contraband”: freed slaves working as employees for a northerner who has leased a liberated cotton plantation. The morally gray complications of this endeavor are the novel’s greatest strength. After many setbacks, the crop comes in, but the new plantation-owner is killed by marauders and his “employees” taken back into slavery. March, deathly ill, ends up in a Washington, DC, hospital, where Marmee visits and meets Grace, now a nurse. Readers of Little Women know the ending.

The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.

Pub Date: March 7, 2005

ISBN: 0-670-03335-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MEMORIAL DAYS
by Geraldine Brooks

- BOOK REVIEW
HORSE
by Geraldine Brooks

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET CHORD
by Geraldine Brooks

bookshelf

HEART-SHAPED BOX

by Joe Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 13, 2007

Much will be made of the kinship of Hill and his superstar father, Stephen King, but Hill can stand on his own two feet....

bookshelf

A rock star buys a ghost who chases him from New York to Florida, blood spurting all the way.

Jude Coyne, after a career in the darker reaches of the rock-music world, lives in upstate New York with Georgia, the latest in a succession of young pierced admirers he calls by the states of their birth. Georgia’s predecessor, Florida, is at the heart of the troubles that arrive when Coyne answers an ad offering a ghost, something special to add to his collection of creepy items that includes a Mexican snuff film. The ghost inhabits a garish suit of clothes that arrives in a heart-shaped box, and the situation is a set-up. Knowing Coyne’s taste for the weird, Florida’s sister has inveigled him into buying the soul of her and Florida’s stupendously evil stepfather, Craddock, a stinker who learned a lot of very bad magic as a soldier in Vietnam. The motive is the apparent suicide of Florida, who Coyne sent home after one too many bouts of depression. Craddock’s ghost immediately gets into Coyne’s head, urging him to murder Georgia and then commit suicide. Coyne resists, but the bad vibes are too much for his gay personal assistant, who flees the farm and hangs himself. Craddock persists in his attack on Coyne, using a ghostly truck as his assault vehicle. Lesser rock stars would have capitulated early on, but Georgia turns out to be full of spunk, and Coyne’s German Shepherds are fierce protectors who the ghost greatly fears. To get rid of Craddock, Coyne figures he will have to go to Florida to find out just what did happen to make that ghost such an abusive spirit.

Much will be made of the kinship of Hill and his superstar father, Stephen King, but Hill can stand on his own two feet. He’s got horror down pat, and his debut is hair-raising fun.