Spoiler alert! This review contains spoilers. The non-spoilered version is at Goodreads.
This is the first book I’ve read by this author and I think I am going to enjoy the rest of this series. It is refreshingly well-researched. So many books that have medicine in the plot get things wrong, sometimes embarrassingly wrong – this one not only got it right, but explained it in terms that should be approachable for the layperson. Of course, I don’t know if I can really make that argument since I’m studying veterinary medicine.
I had ideas on how the MRSA was being spread through the hospitals, and wasn’t let down. One nice thing about studying medicine is that I understood a lot of the how and why in this book. But I genuinely wasn’t expecting the culprit revealed at the end. The entire story with him is unfortunately something I could see happening in the hyper-capitalist hellscape of modern day America. I also wasn’t expecting just quite how close we would come to a different ending – poor Laurie!
Some of the negative reviews I saw focus mostly on Jack’s insistence on having surgery being unrealistic. As someone who knew men who were that age in that time, trust me, that is a realistic depiction of how they would behave. Perhaps not now, but as a reminder, this book was written in the mid 2000s. Men from the 1950s absolutely get these ideas in their heads and won’t listen to reason. Even doctors that should otherwise know better. “It won’t happen to me.”
The other complaint I saw was that the mobsters were too stereotypically mobsters. Eh. I could take it or leave it. I wasn’t particularly offended by the depiction and I certainly didn’t find their parts entirely unbelievable. It could have been better, sure, which is why this gets a 4 star instead of 5. But it didn’t detract from the story enough to make me knock off more than one.
All of this to say: this was a real page turner. I truly enjoyed it. Can’t wait for the next one! Though, next on my reading list is actually a book from the UC Berkeley Virtual Book Club, We Survived the Night.