Prompt – A medical thriller
Medium – Book
About the Book – Carter is a widower, whose wife, son and father have all been killed by instances of medical malpractice. Driven by anger and a desire for revenge, he joins up with a group of men who have suffered similar wrongdoings and they decide to get their own back by carrying out a series of murders and maimings of doctors who have killed, maimed or disabled their patients. In the midst of this, Carter meets Anna, a defence lawyer, who helps him to feel ‘real’ again and that there might be something better than revenge.
My Rating – 2/10. OK. You know those books which are so bad, you feel the need to keep on reading, even though they are so awful? The ones where there is no real character development, potholes galore and really, really bad sex scenes? This is one of those books. To be honest, I kind of knew it would be before I started reading – but I wanted to read a medical thriller which wasn’t about a pandemic, so I went for it. I have some thoughts.
Firstly, I am not sure that the author has ever met a woman, but they sure as anything don’t talk like he thinks they do. I have a lovely husband, who I adore, but I don’t think I have ever called him my ‘one true love’ – I think he might throw up if I did. There are three female characters in this book and lots of very MANLY men. Who talk about their dicks pretty constantly and go around casually murdering people. Brains seem to be in short supply with this group and fairly sharpish, a private detective is on to their scheme. Then they all go to pieces. The female characters are ‘interesting’ and very trope-y. You have:
- The beautiful, intelligent career woman who decides she wants to have children, leave her high-powered job and settle down with the weird murder-y guy. Despite the murders.
- The randomly sexual older woman who (spoilers!) turns out to be the villain of the piece.
- The slightly kooky woman-child secretary to the police department, who gets together with one of the guys in the murder group and follows him around doing murders.
I kid you not.
The punctuation and general editing is shocking, lots of weird bits of speech which should be questions but end up as commands (mostly directed at the women, so maybe that was the author’s plan). Highly awkward sex scenes, which say everything and nothing about what is going on. Random characters appearing and disappearing without trace. Lots of drunkenness. Weirdly unspecific death scenes. Just a whole section at the end where there’s a poisoning, a kidney transplant, a weird dream sequence and a death. It’s all a bit trippy. But I did get through it in an evening.
Would I read it again? No. But it has given me hope – if something as bad as this can be published, maybe my dream of being an author isn’t too far out of my grasp…
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