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INTENSIVE SCARE UNIT
by J. S. Borthwick
St Martin's Minotaur, February 2004
384 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0312324944


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

W C Fields once said that an actor should avoid being in a film with children or dogs, his reason being that they will steal the film. If he were advising J S Borthwick's Sarah Dean and her husband, Alex, he would counsel them not to be in a book with a feisty, cranky, curmudgeonly 80-year-old aunt, because she will take over the book and run away with it. Sarah and Alex are a bowl of tapioca pudding compared to the spicy offering of Aunt Julia.

Aunt Julia has a heart attack (which she keeps calling an 'incident'), having collapsed at her horse farm, insisting that her only problem was that she had skipped breakfast. Fortunately, her foreman is as stubborn as she is and finally convinces her that she must go to the hospital. There, on a gurney after surgery, she witnesses a snippet of the murder of the hospital's former CEO, who is disliked by almost everyone and who, though retired, insists in inserting his 'expertise' in cases he has nothing to do with. He has made so many enemies that the list of suspects isn't short.

Julia's sighting and subsequent insistence that she's been attacked in her room are marked down to post-surgical delusions. But it soon becomes clear that she is not delusional after she changes rooms, and the sister of the hypochondriac, Emma Littlefield (who is a major thorn in Alex's side) is murdered in Julia's old room, the assailant obviously believing that Julia was the victim.

Yet another corpse is added to the mix when Dr Jonathan Phillips, successor to his father as CEO of the hospital is found murdered, a killing for which little/no motivation is supplied.

In the course of her snooping, Julia befriends three volunteers, plying them with pasty and coffee to put them in a mood to share information. She learns that each of them had very good reason for wanting the senior Dr Phillips dispatched. As Sarah begins to sort through their stories, she learns that their alibis were not, after all, watertight.

Borthwick has a deft way with a plot, and the characters are vivid, especially Aunt Julia and the volunteers. However, easily a third of the book is taken up with Sarah's bickering with Alex and the police chief about leaving investigations to the police. Since this seems to be an issue in all the Sarah Dean books, one wishes some sort of truce could be negotiated.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, July 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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