This is a lightning-fast paced story of a young surgery resident at the end of his rope when he discovers that he has not performed enough surgery to meet the requirements for certification. His world is crumbling around him as he falls in love with a nurse who has a demented mother.
The mother sees him as a rival to her affection and is intent at eliminating the competition by using her gang affiliations. Love and romance supersedes the dangers involved as the doctor and nurse are attracted to each other like magnets.
With plenty of sarcastic one-liners, the story shows a powerful image of a man who refuses to knuckle under. He is literally the hero that every red-blooded male wants to be - calm, cool, in control, and able to keep his promises. This is a medical suspense adventure.
Excerpt from Straightjacket We stopped in front of the nurses’ station. Her blue-green eyes were burning a hole through me again, and my heart palpitated, causing me to cough involuntarily. I sat down to look at Thurston’s chart, but she fluttered closer. I could feel the heat of her body as she brushed up against me. She tightened her long white skirt across her thighs, and I felt the warm outline of her legs.I was no match for this woman, this much was certain.“What do you know about Elmer Alcazar?” I asked, hoping to deflect some of her passion.She stepped back. “You mean the sweet old man with the pancreatic tumor?”“Uh, yeah,” I said sheepishly. What I thought was an interesting case study had been a person to her.“I was off duty when he died,” she said sadly. “A male Filipino nurse named Carlo took care of him the night he died. I guess he went into cardiac arrest and died. Probably for the best. He did have cancer.”Maybe she was right. Maybe he had been spared a painful, drawn-out death. Then again, maybe not. I had never met this Nurse Carlo. Maybe he could tell me more.I looked back up at Linda. She was still smoldering. I had always felt sorry for those poor slobs who had been roped into marriage. Now I wasn’t so sure. If women were hunters and men were their prey, I didn’t feel trapped. I felt enticed.“So where are we going for dinner tonight?” she asked.“I know a place,” I said.“You do?”“Yeah. It’s small, out of the way. You’ll like it. I hope.”I left for rounds, but I have no memory of what happened between then and dinner. I was floating. I was in a fog. I was certain that, had anyone watched the exchange between Linda and me, they would have seen the little blue charges pulsing and flickering between us. Linda Marie Jablonski was high voltage.#After work, I met her at a little Italian bistro in a recently gentrified downtown neighborhood near the waterfront. In the past few days, we had flirted dangerously with becoming the subject of hospital gossip, courtesy of the network of spies lurking in the corridors, a creepy scenario not unique to Detroit General. Hospitals often employed mercenary hacks for the sole purpose of watching their fellow employees. Fortunately, there were no prying eyes here, just a few small tables in a cozy, dimly lit joint. Having worked with Linda for a few years now, I had always found her striking, but our paths hadn’t crossed much until recently. In the past few months, I had come to trust her professional judgment. I had also warmed to her in other ways. Admittedly, a good dose of my admiration for her was chemical. The closer we got – literally – the more inevitable a romantic relationship between us seemed. The tension between us was accelerating everything and had taken on a life of its own.Dressed in faded denim jeans and a black turtleneck and wearing her long, wavy hair down, she looked different, and suddenly I felt uncomfortable, like she was a stranger. But the feeling passed, and the more we talked, the more at ease I became. She was still the same woman, even without the white uniform.“So tell me about your family,” I said.“Ugh,” she said while rolling her eyes. “Trust me. You’re not ready for the gory details.”“Okay,” I said. “Well, at least tell me about your last name. Is it Hungarian? Lithuanian?”“Nice try. It’s Polish. My father was a Polish immigrant. An illegal one, actually, until he married my mom.” She coughed quietly and took a sip of her water. “But I’m not talking about my family.”“What’s it mean?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.“What’s what mean?”“Jablonski.”“Oh, that. Something about apples. Jablon means apple tree in Polish. We’re the keepers of the apple trees. Or something like that.”Now I understood why she seemed straight out of the Garden of Eden.I had hoped to avoid talking shop, but that, like the attraction between us, was inevitable. I told her about Trick Edwards and the letter from Arthur Williams to Rizzo.“I’ve got thirty days to complete ten major procedures,” I said, “or Little Hitler cuts me loose without my certification.” I stopped to do the arithmetic. “Technically, I’ve got twenty-five days after today. And nine procedures to go.” I sighed. “All this for not knuckling under to a fool.”She frowned thoughtfully. “It might be smart to go along with the program. That way, everyone gets what they want, including you.” She laughed her goofy laugh. “You might want to lead a normal life someday.”I could tell she only partially believed what she had just said, so I didn’t belabor the point. Much. “I don’t mind following orders from someone who knows what they are doing,” I said, “but it’s hard to cooperate with a nitwit.”I looked up from the menu and found her watching me intently. I met her gaze, but she was good. I looked away first. Something, though, made me look back, and when I did, I found her still staring at me. She had gained the upper hand.“Are you ready to order now?” the portly, middle-aged waiter asked. His voice sounded like it had come from another room, and it was all I could do to break free from Linda’s hypnotic spell.We filled up on pasta and Tuscany bread dipped in olive oil and, after washing it down with a bottle of Chianti, left for her place.As soon as we were inside her apartment, she pulled me to her and brought her lips to mine, the front door still open and the lights off. The setup was awkward, even a bit clumsy, but the delivery itself was enough to make me forget for a moment where I was.She stepped back, clearly taken aback by the fire between us. “Wow.”“Yeah.”While I tried to recover from the lingering effects of our first kiss, she lit a collection of candles on the coffee table and then clicked on the stereo, inserting a Coltrane CD and setting the volume to low. She then turned to face me, one side of her face lit by the glow of the candlelight, the other in the shadows.Her moist and lovely mouth opened, and she said softly, “I’ll do anything for you, Joe.”As she spoke, her blue-green eyes softened, and I willingly entered a temporary refuge away from the nightmare of residency, a responsibility that left me perpetually on-call and that, before tonight, had never interrupted anything important, for my adult life had been spent at the service of my ambition. I ate, slept, and breathed Detroit General. The long and crazy hours, the slavish work ethic, the monkish lifestyle – all were part of the package deal I had dedicated my life to. But tonight, I was answering to another siren, one that fed my heart more than my ego.The freefall ended abruptly when my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it in my coat, which she had been in the process of hastily removing, and answered breathlessly, “Hello?”It was the hospital.
Professional Reviews
Ellen Tanner Marsh
Welcome to the hilarious, hurly burly world of Detroit General Hospital. It’s a wild and
wooly place and, be forewarned, it’s not just the hospital’s patients who need help and
healing.
Thirty-two years old Joe Grady is about to finish his surgical residency and move on to
bigger and better things. But his cost-conscious administrator suddenly gives him a
Herculean task: he has to complete ten major cases in the next thirty days or he’ll be
dismissed without certification. As if that weren’t enough, the hospital is a zoo, the
nurses need to unionize and someone is going around killing patients. Lest this isn’t
sufficient to distract Joe from his task, he’s also falling in love with Linda, a
heartbreakingly gorgeous nurse with a dangerously demented mother.
If you love medical dramas and you’re looking for a clever, engaging read, Richard Sall’s
book is exactly what the doctor ordered. Wildly funny and deeply satirical, Straight
Jacket isn’t just an insightful story about the coming of age of a surgeon. It’s also about
hope, love, healing and the appallingly high cost of medicine. Sall riffs on everything
from malpractice to HMOs to intelligent design and even God. But his real target is the
second-tier caregivers that hospitals hire to cut corners and the dumbing down of the
industry. Dazzlingly written and filled with quirky characters, Straight Jacket is my
prescription for one of the smartest debuts this year.
The Matchmaker:
Angela Calminetti, mother of five, New Age practitioner and gifted psychic and telepath, is proud of her family ties and does everything she can to make sure that all of her younger siblings are as happy in love and marriage
When Miranda Nolan inherits a house she soon discovers a need to solve the mysteries surrounding the late owner along with resolving the strong attraction she feels for a co-claimant who lost his hearing and faces a world of silence.
