Amazon.com Review
If you like your mystery mixed up with fast-paced emergency room action, this latest medical thriller by Leah Ruth Robinson (an emergency room technician herself) is just what the doctor ordered.
In between treating a wide variety of walk-in disasters, Dr. Evelyn Sutcliffe of Manhattan's University Hospital has to sleuth out who poisoned the mushrooms that her close friends consumed at a dinner party. Her friend and colleague Gary Seligman, a nurse who is heavily involved in a nasty labor battle between two rival hospital unions, lies gravely ill in the hospital. Gary has enemies in high-up places. Another possible suspect is Elise, a troubled young woman and a former patient of Dr. Phil Carchiollo (Evelyn's boyfriend). But there could also be a connection to a top doctor at the hospital--who has his own dirty secrets to hide.
As Robinson did in Blood Run and First Cut, she first stuns us with a whirlwind of detail about daily life in an emergency room, and then, when she has our full attention, drops in extra characters and plot to dazzle and baffle us. Guess what? It works. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
There's enough medical traumaAeverything from gunshot wounds and drug overdoses to exploding appendixes and diabetic comasAin Robinson's latest novel about Dr. Evelyn Sutcliffe to fill a year's worth of ER and Chicago Hope episodes. There's also a moderately interesting mystery: just who is trying to kill Sutcliffe and several of her friends with exotic poisons? Is it the gorgeous young woman who's obsessively stalking Ev's psychiatrist boyfriend, stealing Ev's clothes and even dressing up as a Third World beggar to eavesdrop on private conversations? Does the threat have something to do with the anger surrounding the possible merger of Sutcliffe's hospital with one of two competing institutions? Could there be a connection between the poisonings and some financial hanky-panky involving a couple of rich and powerful Yalies? Through it all, Sutcliffe remains a solid island of medical and spiritual strength around which all troubled waters flow. An experienced emergency room technician herself, Robinson (Blood Run; First Cut) fills her narrative with obviously hard-earned wisdom, like this mantra mentally chanted over a poison victim: "The first pulse to take is your own. Distance, distance. Treat the patient, not the poison. Lavage, absorption, catharsis." She also can create characters who come to instant, vivid lifeAsuch as Gary Seligman, the activist nurse who's the first to die from poison. The novel ultimately contains too many friends and family members for all to breathe easily on the page, but nary a reader will complain of a shortage of gripping medical action.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
