A detailed, frustrating attempt to encompass a complicated social issue.
An ambitious, flawed novel of medical fraud.
Nicole Allard lost her job in the financial sector and now works as a “medical shopper,” getting paid to visit doctor’s offices to collect data for insurance companies. Eventually, she gets a job trying to bust shady clinics bilking Medicare. Kreis, the author of eight previous novels about Detroit (The Chief, 2011, etc.), furnishes multiple subplots—an innocent doctor caught in a labyrinthine Medicare audit, a naive doctor from Africa, several struggling homeless people, criminals doing their best to outsmart the Feds, an obligatory love story or two, and more. The author understands the mechanics of the health care system, and reading about the complicated ins and outs of million dollar swindles satisfies, as does the Detroit setting. Yet, while the subplots are interesting, the novel devotes so much ink to exploring every angle of health care fraud—and those conducting, fighting against, or caught up in it—that character development and suspense suffer. When criminals kidnap Allard, the results are bizarre and devoid of terror. Allard bounces back from her assault and kidnapping with lightning speed and goes on another mission a few days later. Then she gets kidnapped again. And again. Even when the character is contemplating whether her captor might rape her, her thoughts remain two-dimensional and inauthentic: “Maybe he will let you screw your way to freedom. Yuck.” There’s an odd running wrinkle in the novel. Allard’s naked body is repeatedly ogled, groped and harassed by male “doctors.” Her response to the harassment at one point is laughable: “You know, last year Rodney and I went to St. Martin. We went to the nude beach every day, and I enjoyed it. I mean, I’m not a prude.” The problem is not whether or not this harassment happens or if this fraud is actually taking place, the problem is in the bland presentation of such rich material.
A detailed, frustrating attempt to encompass a complicated social issue.Pub Date: May 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475052183
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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