Like a soap opera on fast-forward—a speedy plot, none of the sappy melodrama and all the juicy morsels intact.
A series of mishaps and an accidental death at a Pennsylvania hospital raise suspicions of sabotage in the author’s debut medical thriller.
Doctors in the anesthesia department at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital are worried about losing their jobs in an impending merger, so it doesn’t bode well when a patient dies soon after anesthesia is administered. Dr. Doug Landry and others are unaware that someone in their department is intentionally setting up the anesthesiologists for failure in a series of desperate acts that will ultimately lead to outright murder. Benedict’s novel is a mystery story rife with suspense: A killer, whose identity is often concealed, creeps into dark operating rooms; med student Rusty, searching for his elusive past, finds his way to Mercy; and a patient awakens in the midst of surgery, unable to move but feeling every agonizing cut. There’s a hefty number of subplots that tend to be relevant only for individual characters (though some are linked to the nefarious goings-on later in the narrative) and feature details that readers may associate with hospital dramas on television: Doug’s temptation to stray from his marriage vows with a flirtatious hospital employee; sympathetic Dr. Mike Carlucci recalling patients he’s lost and trying not to succumb to the pressures of the job; plus Rusty’s training and the threat of a suit against the hospital. But perpetually shifting perspectives and a focus on the darker side of medical care—Doug tells Rusty how easily anesthesia, inadvertently or not, can become lethal—ensure that the various plots are less sentimental and more in tune with the murderous saboteur. Twists and turns abound as the story progresses, and though they can be a bit predictable, they hit a crescendo in a scene of utter ferocity that’s violent and intense. Benedict rounds out his novel with hospital humor that’s nicely subdued, as when a scrub nurse who thinks she’s being watched is so unsettled that she has an acute condition of cutis anserina—the medical term for goose bumps.
Like a soap opera on fast-forward—a speedy plot, none of the sappy melodrama and all the juicy morsels intact.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484897522
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
