Was it mercy or was it murder? In this first novel, practicing physician Jim Rold, M.D. confronts the dilemma faced by all medical practitioners today: how to care for a suffering patient when the only merciful solution is death. Dr. Rold draws upon his own work with terminally-ill patients to create a compelling portrait of religious fundamentalism, moral dilemmas, and the "hard choices" involved in euthanasia. Fictional doctor Joshua Wesley is a doctor in a small Kentucky town who decides, after intense internal struggles, to help three terminally ill patients die. Creating characters both detailed and complex, Dr. Rold draws the reader into the first-degree murder trial that follows, and the outcry and support that emerges following these deaths. This spellbinding medical novel is bound to stir controversy and cause all readers to think: is it first degree murder, or first degree love?
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Radiologist Rold'spk first novel provides a fictional view of mercy killing as a natural, almost inevitable treatment recourse by Joshua Wesley, the pk story's narrator. The reader follows Wesley's coming-of-age in rural Kentucky, medical training and first years of practice in the small town where he was raised. One day, he induces septicemia in a former grade-school teacher of his who has terminal cancer and begs to be put out of her misery. However, he goes on to commit euthanasia in two rather more ambiguous situations. His actions seem less based on a carefully considered ethical decision than on a kind of trance, ``an irreversible force . . . as deadly as the irresistible flame awaiting the intrepid moth in the night.'' When apprehended and tried for murder, Wesley articulates a rationalization--that hell is disease and salvation is relief from suffering; thus Wesley asserts that euthanasia is ``first degree love,'' not murder. But Rold's often rambling prose and his curiously grandiose, doubt-free protagonist fail to offer a penetrating examination of the moral dilemma of euthanasia. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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