Medical thriller set in a decaying Philadelphia hospital for the inner-city poor. In Payback (1991), ex-reporter George Gray got the goods on big-time crooks, then blackmailed them, which he knows is more painful to the crooks than jail time. This time out, George visits an old friend in Clarke Hospital who dies in unnecessary pain. Piqued, Gray smells graft afloat in the halls and checks himself in as a heart-attack victim, a state he knows how to simulate. (Even so, the staff nearly loses him!) George sneaks about, pops open files, and finds that pain-ridden patients are being cheated on their morphine and expensive drugs by being given placebos or useless, cheap substitutes. Someone is racking up millions off patients' pain. And patients are also silently being murdered by a serial killer who stalks the halls—ironically, the hospital's most respected healer, Dr. John A. Walker, the brilliant, tireless, ever-helpful, assistant chief of critical care and white god of the interns and other residents. Sad to say, Walker's a big sickie who gets a kick out of strangling old ladies or jabbing elderly men with naughty needles that stop the breath. What's more, Walker is bedding hospital administrator Nancy Abbott, who runs the drug scam and signs Walker's bodies out to nursing homes that never receive them (they go into pauper's graves) but that bill the government for payments to be split with Abbott and Walker. Meanwhile, George Gray falls in with terrific resident Molly Hale, who helps him break into files. But little does Molly know that Walker regularly etherizes her while she sleeps off-duty in the hospital, strips her down, and enjoys God's handiwork. Walker's motivation as a killer: to experience ``final fear'' in those he murders and overcome it in himself. Less striking than Payback, with Gray cracking secrets faster than a ferret, but the lore about the money-side of hospitals is top-notch.
Pub Date: July 2, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-74532-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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