Customer Reviews

The Death Shift: The True Story of Nurse Genene Jones and the Texas Baby Murders

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Older book but still a good read. The fact a nurse could hurt children for her own weird highs is pretty frightening. The book was well researched and for the most part flowed with only a few slow parts about hospital administration etc.

Very good story, I enjoyed reading it, but it could be shorter. This thing was three hundred and something pages long, and it was very repetitive. When it came to the court hearings and everything they kind of dragged the story out a little. But it was a very shocking, thrilling read. It went pretty quick in the beginning of the story, and had me going for awhile.

I think people who enjoy reading true crime novels should pick this one up, and skip the pages that bore you because you won't miss much of the story. Trust me, I skipped like 10 pages of the whole book and got the just of it.

Death Shift tells of the mysterious deaths of babies in a San Antonio hospital in 1981. The incidents stopped when nurse, Genene Jones, left. She moved to Kerrville and began working for a clinic. Again young children began to die abruptly. The book analyzes why a nurse would kill the patients she was trained to save. Gripping account!

I found the story fascinating. The nurse involved was not a mercy killer, or a sadist. She just liked the excitement of "codes" that revived dying children, so started giving kids injections to make the codes happen. This is a variation of "Munchausen by proxy" syndrome, that sometimes is the cause of children's hospitalizations, where usually the mom causes her child to be sick so that she can nurse her child and get attention. What I found even more fascinating was how hospital politics worked to deny they had a problem: as far as punishing the whistleblowing nurse and doctor in charge of the nursery. A sad but true story of how malpractice (and even murder) can be and sometimes is covered up in our modern hospitals.

Death Shift tells of the mysterious deaths of babies in a San Antonio hospital in 1981. The incidents stopped when nurse, Genene Jones, left. She moved to Kerrville and began working for a clinic. Again young children began to die abruptly. The book analyzes why a nurse would kill the patients she was trained to save. Gripping account!

"The Death Shift, a riveting story of true crime and justice, is a journalistic tour de force. It's all there. You finish the last page with no questions left. Through his meticulous reporting, Peter Elkind finds answers to questions that even the prosecutors could not fathom. This angel of mercy with a needle emerges as one of the most terrifying serial killers in the history of crime in America. No murder victims were ever more innocent. Reading about their fate will bring a lump to your throat." --Edna Buchanan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Miami Herald and author of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face

"The Death Shift is a gripping true crime story, but it is more than that too. Peter Elkind has gotten hold of the nature of pure evil, and the inability of a medical bureaucracy to extirpate it." --Nicholas Lemann, author of Out of the Forties

"It is regrettable that in recent years non-fiction crime books have become, in large part, a mediocre genre. Elkind's book restores the genre to the level of quality intended by its creators--Capote and Thompson. The Death Shift is not merely reportage. The author's eye for detail, his ability to sift through a mountain of raw data and pinpoint the salient facts, his sense of the dramatic--most of all, his empathy with each and every character--make this book bona fide literature. It proves what great non-fiction should; that truth is stranger than fiction." --Jim Atkinson, co-author of Evidence of Love

Just what the world needs, another true-crime evil nurse book. Ploddingly written, and just uninterestingly rendered. Author should be writing VCR manuals. Skip this boring thing.

This was a very cruel book. I enjoyed it though it doesn't get boring right away, though some parts do...... I think the author left out a few details in between, but I don't know for sure, I guess that's just the way the book goes.......