An ingenious, original and page-turning crime novel.
It intertwines two stories: comatose patients recovering, or not, in a hospital ward, seen both from the point of view of one of the patients and from some of the nurses; and an anatomy student with severe Asperger's syndrome learning to dissect a human corpse. These stories intersect when the student realises that the official cause of death of the cadaver he is studying is incorrect, and he begins to suspect foul play.
The verisimilitude is amazing. I learnt so much about coma (they don't just lie there!) and recovery from coma and about human anatomy. The character with Asperger's was treated with honesty and empathy and some humour. Other characters were also beautifully depicted, including the lazy, husband-hunting nurse and a devastatingly sad portrait of the Asperger's student's mother.
The second half of the book, as the mystery deepens and the hunt for the killer turns into a fight for survival, is nail-bitingly exciting.
Selected quotes:
- "Even though he never asked, she would tell him about the garden and the cat. It always went on for a lot longer than either of them deserved." (Ch 10)
- "Months of lying prone without the benefit of circulation had left the body flattened on the bottom like a bag of sand. Now inverted, the buttocks remained oddly two-dimensional." (Ch 15)
- "Tracey Evans is an idiot. God knows how she passed her nursing exams, but she has the literacy skills and attention span of a toddler on Tartrazine. How can she mistake 'wife' for 'wofe'? What's a wofe when it's at home." (Ch 18)
- "Tapping my chest in that creepy way that doctors do - as if they're trying to find a secret passage in a smuggler's wall." (Ch 25)
- "If you can't trust a mirror, what can you believe?" (Ch 25)
- "He'd been more of an anti-careers master, really, selling them the spaces between work." (Ch 48)
A wonderful read.
February 2020; 313 pages
Also by Belinda Bauer and reviewed in this blog:
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