THE WARFIELD SYNDROME

In pentothal prose, Denker (Error of Judgment) returns to the medical circuit, this time focusing on lovely Dr. Christine Warfield, professor of neurology at University Hospital in a D.C. suburb. Although she has "striking regular features," Chris' "intelligence supersedes her beauty, color and style" when she's in her white lab coat—and she has two cases here to keep her beeper tweedling. There's famous violinist Josef Benders, who needs surgery for a brain tumor—but Josef's protective mother Molly (a deathcamp survivor) apologetically chooses to ignore Chris' warnings and picks a surgeon who works through tiny apertures in the skull rather than sensible wide ones: after surgery, Josef is soon brain-dead, and Chris has a wearying time seeing to it that, for Molly's sake, the plug is pulled. And then there's physicist/spy Gilbert Hopkins (his late wife was Chris' college classmate), who got a bullet in his head when a Russian secret-information source was assassinated: Chris' job, amid government hassling, is to bring Hopkins back from coma and memory loss. . . while comforting Hopkins' 15-year-old daughter Alice. Furthermore, throughout all this, Chris must resist pressure from the hospital not to testify against a bungling doctor for malpractice. With solid chunks from medical repair manuals and a ten-page operation—a second-hand doctor drama that's several scalpelcuts below such authentic items as Neil Ravin's M.D. (p. 35).