A topical, serpentine thriller with a conscience.
A dramatic, high-stakes drama centered on a health care fraud.
Orthopedic surgeon Kreis (The Pain Doc, 2013, etc.) has parlayed his extensive medical acumen into impressively dynamic medical thrillers. In his latest, Ariadne Corporation, a health care organization which also administers retirement communities, is poised to acquire Widmark Medical in a blockbuster merger. Anxious Argentinian-German immigrant Karl Ramirez, a manager at Michigan-based Bloomeer Medical Supply, is offered a lucrative opportunity to lead the company’s home-care division. Then, suspiciously, employee Marshall Widmark is found dead, an apparent suicide. As Karl adjusts to his new job at Ariadne, he finds evidence that the company has been systematically purchasing unnecessary equipment and that physicians on the Ariadne dole are performing unnecessary surgeries and charging Medicare for them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Tony Evans learns more about the operation and begins working with (and romancing) Janique Halstrom, Ariadne’s lead marketing representative. As both become embroiled in the scam, Gillian Russell of the U.S. Department of Justice’s health care fraud task force has her hands full investigating the physicians in Ariadne’s pocket. Her sting operation finds a whole lot of fraud—and puts all the characters in harm’s way. The novel’s prose can sometimes be clunky (“His father made an awkward gesture suggesting he was about to give Tony an uncharacteristic hug”), particularly in early chapters, in which the author seems to have difficulty developing the plot and characters simultaneously. Once the plot is established, however, Karl, Janique and crew capably handle the illegalities and swiftly bring down the Medicare fraud. Kreis dedicates this thriller to the “millions of healthcare workers who deliver honest, ethical and cost-effective care to Americans on a daily basis,” and he obviously had a grand time crafting all the minor details. Overall, he delivers an often engrossing, if occasionally uneven, entertainment.
A topical, serpentine thriller with a conscience.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494749606
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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