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LETHAL RISK
by W. H. Watford
Pinnacle, December 2003
352 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0786015810


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sixteen-year-old Shannon Willis and Dr Saban are caught taking papers out of a dark office in coastal, rural Duvall, Louisiana. Saban gives half the files to Shannon and tells her to run out the back of the building; he goes out the front and is shot by the police. Two policemen are also shot during the fracas.

Shannon and the two wounded men end up at South Bay Hospital, where 28-year-old Dr Jack Harris is the intern on loan from New Orleans. He has already qualified in another specialty, so he gets paid intern pay, has to work intern hours, but can sign off on cases that require the signature of a licensed physician.

Because of lack of funds, the ER closes at 7pm, so Jack stabilizes the policeman with a pneumothorax and severed artery in his arm, and gets him on a chopper to New Orleans. The other man is not so badly injured. Jack goes to finish treating the girl and finds she has left while he was busy in the office. When Harris goes to get his car to go home to his brain-damaged younger brother, Ed, he sees Shannon talking to some men in a car. Somehow, this doesn't look kosher, so Jacks gets Shannon into his car, buys her a meal, checks her into a motel, tells her he will pick her up first thing in the morning, and goes home to take care of Ed. The next morning, Shannon is missing and Jack is suspected.

Nevertheless, as the only ER doctor in town, (Saban, now dead, was the other), he goes to work only to find a strange case, apparently a case of the DTs, raging in the ER. The man's family claims it can't be DTs because the man hasn't had a drink in months. Jack calls his cousin, a PI, to come and help him find Shannon and establish his innocence.

Jack knows he is innocent so he fights to keep his job as he and his PI cousin, Buck, try to find Shannon, while trying to evade the men who kidnapped, and possibly killed her. Jack doesn't know that they won't kill Shannon, who is hidden on a fishing vessel, until she tells then where the files are. The bad guys don't know that Jack is not the effete doctor he seems to be, but, before going to medical school, was a roughneck on one of the oil rigs in the gulf, until his brother was badly injured in an accident there.

This is an exciting medial thriller. It's a book you shouldn't start at bedtime because it will keep you awake . . . "Just one more page . . . just to the end of the chapter . . . just one more chapter" until you find you have gulped the whole thing in one sitting.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, March 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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