Matt McAvoy Book Review

Fans of medical dramas will line up to buy this book and, if they don’t, they should.  The author writes with authority and I suggest must be a doctor, but the information is not difficult for the layman to understand.  Alongside the medicine is the excellent characterization and the novelist’s savoury intimation that something sinister has indeed infiltrated the life of the young woman lying motionless in a hospital bed.

Patricia Harding is 28 and works for a legal firm. Benjie is her geeky and immature husband.  When Patricia collapses at work with heart rhythm disturbances for which there is no obvious cause, Benjie irritates everybody at the hospital - but does he fit the role of murderer?  Matters deteriorate when the Head of Cardiology dies in an equally suspicious way.  Enter the police, and the novel is suddenly more than just a puzzle for the tight knit community of New City Hospital to solve; all the intrigue and gradual unfolding of a good crime story are present.  Dr. Tom Bolling employs his military background to good effect and his backstory draws the reader’s attention.  I would like to see another medical mystery starring Dr. Bolling - perhaps a whole series of them.  Even at the three-quarter mark, I had little clue to the identity of the perpetrator, yet it all made sense and I was quite gripped to uncover the links between the two deaths.  

The chapters about medical and detective work are fascinating, but there are also a number of chapters early on which succeed one another and relate to hospital personalities, politics and history, and they detract from the tension.  Readers enjoy tension and there are some excellent examples in this novel.  The writing has so much authority and is bound to absorb readers of crime and medicine, so that the author could give some thought about which of the many minor characters need to be there.  Whodunnits are all about pace, but an author still needs to look objectively at his book from the reader’s perspective.  This reader was very interested.  Highly recommended.