Authentic characters and a vivid hospital setting enhance a tense medical tale.
In this debut thriller, a Memphis anesthesiologist suspects a neurosurgeon of intentionally harming—and sometimes killing—patients.
Dr. Roxanne Roth has trained hard to overcome her fear of losing a patient while administering anesthesia. Her fiance, Mark, died five years ago during a relatively simple surgery. While she’s had no romantic interest since that tragedy, there’s currently a mutual attraction between her and the resident doctor she works with, Justin Kirkland. But she’s less fond of a surgeon she periodically assists: Dr. D.K. Webb. The medical executive committee has Webb under review after two of his patients had serious postoperative complications, including a stroke. Readers know that Webb has performed surgeries while intoxicated and is a regular cocaine user. When his carelessness leads to a patient’s death, Roxanne believes Webb purposefully made the fatal cut. Her new goal is to see that Webb’s medical license is revoked. Webb, meanwhile, is determined to wield the scalpel and maintain his drug habit. He’s an exceedingly dangerous man whose disturbing behavior soon captures the attention of other medical professionals as well as the authorities. As Webb’s misdeeds escalate, Roxanne attempts to involve the Drug Enforcement Administration, but Webb may find a way to target the anesthesiologist. Shiloah excels at character development. Roxanne, for example, is an empathetic protagonist who feels guilt over a patient’s death, even when it’s unquestionably Webb’s fault. Romance is delightfully complicated: Roxanne can’t help but compare Justin to Mark, and her earlier one-stand night with a co-worker may cause problems for her potential relationship. At the same time, there’s a growing uneasiness surrounding Webb, who seems to enjoy cutting patients and turns progressively creepier. Along with convincing dramatic moments, Shiloah writes astute and occasionally exhilarating hospital scenes that readers unfamiliar with medical jargon will effortlessly follow.
Authentic characters and a vivid hospital setting enhance a tense medical tale. (acknowledgements)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73519-300-7
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
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