Krishna
Sydney Sheldon is one author whose many books we have reviewed in the past. For a sample, see A Stranger In The Mirror, Memories of Midnight or Tell Me Your Dreams in earlier posts here.
District Attorney Carl Andrews is stunned that out of the three women doctors living together, one kills a patient for money, the other is murdered and the third has closed down a whole hospital. Why? He asks his chief prosecutor Gus Venable to take the case and make sure Dr Paige Taylor gets the gas chamber – no less.
Gus was sure he can get the death penalty for Dr Taylor as it was an open and shut case. She killed John Cronin for a lot of money. Jason Curl, who loves her, is dismayed. He finds a good lawyer called Alan Penn to defend her.
As ever, the story is a flashback. Three new graduates from medical school join an old, venerable hospital. One of them is Paige. The others are Kat and Honey. They both seem to have a secret. Kat is an African American and has a family issue. Honey seems to have been hounded out of a city by a Sheriff for some -as yet unknown- dirty deed.
Honey Tratt seems to have found the key in sex. A plain girl, she discovers the power of sex and uses it to get a reputation and A grades where necessary from single male teachers. She screws her way to good grades. When she finally rapes the Reverend with whom she is staying, his wife catches them at it and the Reverend commits suicide. Honey is expelled from the town and ends up in California. This much we learn about her backstory
When a surgeon supervisor suspects that Honey is a fake, and assigns her to a very tough doctor to evaluate, Honey passes with flying colours, thanks to an assistant with whom she had a prior understanding of sex if he helped her.
Meanwhile there is a drug theft problem at the hospital and Paige suspects the good doctor Dr Mitch Campbell. Another puzzle? The creepy Dr Harry Bowman, who hits in Paige every possible moment, owns a Lamborghini supposedly left by his rich and clever father, but Paige manages to find that his father was really a barber.
She correctly identifies Harry as the culprit and realizes that Dr Harry was simply trying to hide onset of Parkinsons.
She gets a chance to work with the world famous cardiologist Dr Barker. He is charm-incarnate to patients but a demon with the young assistant doctors.
When a young doctor takes a bet that he can get into Kat’s pants and takes even bets with all other interns, Kat becomes aware of it and plays games to make him think the bedding is imminent, all the while managing to thwart him due to ‘unexpected emergencies’ every time!
Nothing to do with the main story (But what story? It all seems to wander a bit, unlike the author’s other novels) but is interesting to read.
Honey meanwhile thrives in the hospital by her ‘favours’ done to senior doctors.
Meanwhile, James, an architect, comes to love Paige and he woos her with dates but Paige is always reluctant to commit.
The story goes in bits and pieces; a gangster is brought to the hospital with head injury and if Honey did not save him, his gangster friends say that her brother is in trouble.
Meanwhile Kat is tricked by the doctor finally by “confessing” his intention and apologizing, thereby having her in bed and having her declare that he won. She believes that they were going to get married.
All disjointed pieces, unlike his other tales. There is Jimmy who has a lame joke every time he meets her and when he is in a coma, she revives him – and he responds with another lame joke, whereby she knows he is out of danger.
All individually interesting as quirks but since they don’t tie up at all, it looks like you are reading several three page stories jumbled together by mistake instead of one novel. Very unusual to find in a Sydney Sheldon story, for sure.
Kat is now proud of her find she is in love with the doctor and Paige somehow gets the feeling that Kat is being taken for a ride. Meanwhile Dr Grover torments Paige so much that she decides to quit but changes her mind in the last minute when she finds that Grover suffered a stroke and will not work there any more.
Kat and the young doctor have a relationship regularly but now the doctor is bored with her and wants to move on.
There is another cantankerous old man, John Cronin – yes the guy whom the case in the preface is about – who insults Paige and does not want her, and later strikes a friendship with her – this seems to be a repeating pattern in this book. He gets to know her better and changes his tune, becoming friendly with her.
Meanwhile the doctor saved the life of a billionaire, who wants to set him up with a private practice. As a bonus, his daughter falls in love with him and they start a relationship.
When he goes to tell Kat that he wants to break off the relationship, she tells him that she is pregnant. Knowing that Kat will never let him go voluntarily and seeing that his whole future is at stake, he knows that the only way out is to kill Kat. He manages to drug her with an untraceable medicine that he bought at a far off pharmacy and makes her killing look like a botched abortion. Paige is not fooled for a minute.
She goes to great lengths to find the truth about the murder and manages to trap Ken in a contradicting lie, after figuring out where he bought the medication and even figuring out why there was no trace of the medicine in Kat’s body.
Meanwhile after Cronin dies, she finds out that she has inherited a fortune from him but is then accused of killing him for the money. The case seems to go totally against her when a surprise witness arrives and in an even more bizarre fashion, bails her out instead of hitting another nail in her metaphorical coffin. Read the book to find the details as this is one scene that is pure Sydney and is thrilling till the last minute.
Even so, the overall story has a stitched up feel to it, and I would only say it deserves a 5/10
= = Krishna