Before my world came crashing down, I had it all. The successful career I dreamed of. The beautiful red-brick home where I could relax in front of the fire. The handsome, devoted husband whose blue eyes and charming smile always made me feel safe.
As I call time of death, my voice is steady. My colleagues stand hushed around me, their eyes on me, confused, concerned.
I have never lost a patient until today.
My hands tremble inside their gloves. I slide down the cold tiled walls, my heart racing in my chest.
I have never hated a patient until today.
But what choice did I have, once I recognized him?
And what will I do to protect myself, if someone learns the truth?
I picked this one up through Kindle Unlimited after reading the author's much newer novel, The Ransom, and all I can say is... wow. If you told me these two books were written by entirely different authors, I would have believed you without hesitation.
The biggest problem with this novel is that it suffers from two major issues at the same time: the characters are both unlikable and wildly unrealistic, and the plot itself drags on far longer than necessary while repeatedly covering the same (wildly unrealistic) ground. Neither of those things is particularly enjoyable on its own, but together they made this a frustrating reading experience from beginning to end.
Let's start with Anne.
Anne is supposedly a brilliant and highly respected heart surgeon who has never lost a patient during her long career (a statistical improbability, but whatever). That streak comes to an end when Caleb fails to wake up following surgery. And well, the circumstances surrounding his death are bizarre, to say the least. After successfully completing the operation, Caleb's heart simply refuses to restart. Anne attempts to revive him, but then she happens to glance around a curtain and recognizes him as the man who once hurt her adoptive sister. At that point, she essentially gives up and calls the time of death.
From here on out, the book spends an enormous amount of time having Anne question whether she's a terrible person, whether she's a murderer, whether she intentionally let him die, and so on. The problem is that we're also repeatedly told she knows his heart should have restarted on its own and that something unusual occurred. So instead of creating moral ambiguity, the story just leaves her stuck in an endless cycle of self-doubt that becomes repetitive quickly. To make matters worse, she proceeds to make a series of incredibly foolish decisions that realistically should have had significant consequences. Yet somehow they never seem to catch up with her.
On the other side of the aisle, we have Paula.
Professionally, Paula is an assistant state prosecuting attorney known as "The Pit Viper" because of her ruthless courtroom tactics. She's positioned to eventually take over the Criminal Prosecutions Bureau and has spent her entire career clawing her way to the top from nothing. In theory, she should have been one of the most interesting characters in the book.
Instead, she came across as exhausting.
Everything she's achieved has been earned through hard work, but rather than taking pride in how far she's come, she seems to carry around a permanent chip on her shoulder. Yes, there are explanations buried in her past that attempt to justify some of her behavior, but those revelations arrive far too late to change my opinion of her. The fact that she spends so much time criticizing Anne for being entitled while simultaneously making decisions that jeopardize everything she's worked for was honestly laughable.
And finally there's Anne's husband, Derrek.
Derrek dreams of becoming Mayor of Chicago and is willing to do absolutely anything to get there, including cheating on his wife with someone who can help raise his public profile.
A real prince, that one.
As frustrating as the characters were, the plot itself wasn't much better. One of the biggest questions I kept asking was why law enforcement seems almost entirely absent from major portions of the story. Paula is a prosecutor, yet somehow she appears to operate independently of the police at every turn. At one point, even the arrest of a suspect is handled by her private investigator rather than actual law enforcement. How does that make sense?
Likewise, how did someone supposedly intelligent enough to rise so far in her profession become so singularly obsessed with one person and one situation that she completely abandons common sense? Time and time again, characters made decisions that felt designed to keep the plot moving rather than actions real people would realistically take.
And Anne wasn't much better. After everything she experiences throughout the novel, she proves remarkably willing to forgive and forget when a convenient last-minute confession appears. Not once, but twice. The first instance was particularly frustrating because the confession involved events that essentially set the entire story in motion. Instead of feeling satisfying, it felt like the book was rushing to tie up loose ends as quickly as possible.
In the end, I'm genuinely torn when it comes to this author. I absolutely hated this novel and struggled with almost every aspect of it, but the same time, I genuinely enjoyed one of her more recent books, which leaves me wondering whether this was simply an early misstep rather than an accurate reflection of her work as a whole.
For now, I'm willing to give this author another chance. Whether that chance pays off remains to be seen.
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