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Brain
Dead |
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OXOXOXO OXOXOXO
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Nursing is everything to Timmie Leary-Parker, the protagonist of Eileen Dreyer’s latest medical thriller, Brain Dead. It’s her talent, her passion, her very sense of self. And ultimately, it’s her training in the handling of evidence as a forensic nurse that helps her piece together the mysterious deaths of several elderly patients as well as the ex-husbands of some of her ER co-workers. Leary-Parker recently moved to the small Missouri town to be closer to her father, who is deteriorating rapidly from Alzheimer’s. She suffers from withdrawal after leaving the gunshot-a-minute L.A. emergency room for the croup-a-minute idleness of her current job. Though the few serious trauma cases that come into the ER occasionally provide a big enough hit of adrenaline to satisfy her professional cravings, she slowly realizes that trying to solve the murder mystery supplies an equally potent dose. Her biggest challenge, though, is to convince the rest of the town that the rising death toll is not a natural phenomenon. She becomes a poster child for forensic nursing as she struggles to enlighten town officials, particularly the coroner, who think that forensic nursing is a euphemism for a dirty word. As she points out evidence that her trained eye catches and they miss, they dismiss her as a lunatic. Initially the only one who believes her is a washed-up, dried-out, former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who is trying to ride out the last vestiges of his wave of success in relative anonymity at the local paper. They team up to find some answers to the questions that no one else in town seems to be asking. Dreyer, a former trauma and forensic nurse, crafts a believable tale. Deftly she weaves just enough medical detail into the drama to lend it authenticity, but not so much that the novel sounds like a textbook. Only rarely does she provide a glimpse of her previous genre (romance novels written under the pseudonym Kathleen Korbel). When she briefly describes the reporter eyeing a woman on a horseback, I had visions of Fabio on the bookcover of a Harlequin romance. But such lapses are few. Dreyer writes with style and flavor. Her dialog is plausible; her characterizations, believable. Her chronicling of Leary-Parker’s father’s slide into dementia is a dramatic account that many people with elderly parents can identify with. The backdrop of proposed mergers and cost-cutting measures will likely be familiar to anyone in healthcare. As gratifying a read as this book is for medical personnel, Dreyer’s appeal is universal. The frequent twists and turns of the plot, as well as a few intriguing dead ends, make this a satisfying page-turner even if you aren’t a health professional. Reviewed by Anne Federwisch, OTR |
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