Rating: 
Summary: A jumble of characters
Review: I first read White's Privileged Information, which was incredible. Then I read Harm's Way, which was only so-so. Private Practices is back into the "incredible" category. Our psychologist hero, Dr. Alan Gregory, it back in his role as a consultant with the county, this time with the coroner's office. The book starts off with an action-packed murder in the office he shares with Diane, his partner. It turns out that the murder is connected to clients of both Diane and him. Alan is pressed into duty by the coroner's office, and his police pal, to solve what seem to be a string of unrelated crimes. Soon the crimes begin to affect Alan and those close to him. This is a powerfully suspenseful mystery, and I am happy to highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: A non-stop action mystery!
Review: I first read White's Privileged Information, which was incredible. Then I read Harm's Way, which was only so-so. Private Practices is back into the "incredible" category. Our psychologist hero, Dr. Alan Gregory, it back in his role as a consultant with the county, this time with the coroner's office. The book starts off with an action-packed murder in the office he shares with Diane, his partner. It turns out that the murder is connected to clients of both Diane and him. Alan is pressed into duty by the coroner's office, and his police pal, to solve what seem to be a string of unrelated crimes. Soon the crimes begin to affect Alan and those close to him. This is a powerfully suspenseful mystery, and I am happy to highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Insipid hero, Unappealing Characters, Unbelievable Storyline
Review: I found this book to be most disappointing. Dr. Alan Gregory is written as a surprisingly passive, certainly insipid, and generally unappealing protagonist. The women in the book are a stereotypical, albeit disappointing, blend of "toughness" and sexuality, supposedly with dashes of intelligence thrown in. Interestingly, these women, along with so many other stronger characters in the book, seemingly pull the perpetually weak, and befuddled Gregory by the nose throughout his "adventure". .... All in all, very disappointing.
Rating: 
Summary: Page turning suspense, dry humor and romance
Review: I've been a big fan of Stephen White for many years. I re-read Private Practices in one sitting last night. It only reconfirmed why I grab White's books as soon as they're printed.First and fundamentally, White writes with great suspense and lots of unexpected twists and turns. In this book, a ski death, a spousal abuse murder,the crash of the United flight in Sioux City, a gas explosion and a gourmet restaurant all find their way into the tangled web. Still,when I recommend White to friends (which I do often), the recommendation always includes the wonderful dry humor of the books.About 3/4's of the humor is universal and a healthy forth is directed at Colorado things - weather, the People's Republic of Boulder and skiers. Funny enough for outsiders and really big grins for locals. One word of caution to new readers of the Alan Gregory series. Unlike many male slueths, Alan doesn't have a new babe in each book. If you want to follow his romantic relationship, as well as the progress of friends and neighbors, this is a series worth reading in sequence. It starts with Priviledged Information. This book, Private Practices, is the second in the series...
Rating:
Summary: Reasonably fast paced thriller
Review: If you like Jonathan Kellerman, you will like Stephen White. Their styles are very similar and th main character is even a psycholgist which is similar. The big difference I feel is that this character seems more human. He has to make life changing decisions while solving a case.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Jonathan Kellerman clone
Review: Jonathan Kellerman is a psychologist, he lives in Los Angeles. He began publishing thrillers in 1985. Stephen White is a psychologist, he lives in Boulder, CO. He began publishing thrillers in 1991. Kellerman's protagonist is a psychologist who lives in Los Angeles. White's protagonist is a psychologist who lives in Boulder. Kellerman's Alex Delaware has a friend who is a gay Los Angeles police detective. White's Alan Gregory, by way of contrast, has a friend who is a straight Boulder police detective. Delaware took a long time to settle a case of Munchausen's by proxy; in this book Gregory does it in record time.
All of this suggests that White is not very original, which is true. But do you really want an original mystery/thriller? If you like Kellerman, you should like White.
Rating:
Summary: A jumble of characters
Review: Mr. White kept adding characters until finally I just couldn't keep track of who was who and who did what!! A real mumbo-jumbo!
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not the best
Review: Stephen White is, without a doubt, a truly extraordinary author. Even when his books aren't as good as you'd hoped, they're still good enough that you don't want to put them down (and, in my case, are willing to give them a second chance and re-read it). This book, while not the best, is still enjoyable. I believe the author hit his stride in "Remote Control" and has been off and running since. While the book would've benefited from fewer characters (I had to go back and find where one was introduced to find out what her importance was), it was still enjoyable and had me reading well past midnight.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing and endless
Review: The first White book I read was MANNER OF DEATH. This one seemed to go on and on and on without going anywhere, sort of like walking or running on a treadmill. It never seemed to go anywhere until the end where he tied it together FINALLY!!. The characters were fractured as well as the storyline. I could not keep track of all the characters nor did I want to because frankly they were not that interesting. A disappointment compared to MANNER OF DEATH.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe they do it differently in Colorado
Review: The protagonist of this book, Dr. Alan Gregory, is an extremely orthodox, quite pedestrian psychotherapist of a very old-fashioned psychodynamic sort. This book is not interesting psychologically--there is nothing going on here psychologically but jejune sketches of ordinary notions. If the protagonist's therapeutic work and psychological insight are insipid and uninspired, though, his obsession with patient confidentiality is off-the-wall. Since that is a central, oft-repeated plot device, I found the plot strained, at best. I've practiced psychotherapy for a long time, written a lot of reasonably well respected stuff about it, and known a lot of heavyweights pretty well. I have never met anyone who sees confidentiality the way that Dr. Gregory, and presumably the author, see it. At the very least, for most practicing mental health professionals confidentiality is a much more complex, murky area than for Dr. Gregory. And some of Dr. Gregory's grand ethical principles--well, folks, it just don't work like that. Everybody I know would consider Dr. Gregory ridiculously officious, lacking in judgment. Here's a fact--we talk to each other, and to our significant others, about our patients. That's how we stay sane, and how we learn. We don't just talk to supervisors or consultants--most of us don't have supervisors after we've gotten a few years of experience under our belts, and we only use consultants on especially vexing cases. For the day-to-day work of keeping our own heads clear and our attitudes balanced, we are like everyone else in the world--we rely on ordinary conversations with our colleagues and loved ones. No therapist is more dangerous than the one who does not, as a matter of course, talk of his work to the people he knows and cares about, whose judgment he trusts, and who know him well enough to tell him when he's getting off track. At best that therapist stays stuck within his own perspective, failing to learn on a day to day basis from others. At worst, he comes to take for granted his deep wisdom--since he has no, and feels no need for, routine correctives as part of the texture of his day--and gets lost in a solipsistic sense of his self-importance. Here's another fact: Murderers and dead people have very little standing in malpractice suits. And no one I know is so arrogant about the sanctified absolute importance of therapy completely overruling all other moral obligations that he or she would not help the cops when the only people whose confidentiality is in question are either victims or probable killers-on-the-loose. (There are plenty of ways to release information without violating any laws, hence fulfilling the moral obligations that transcend one's professional role AND abiding by professional strictures.) I'm not sure that patient confidentiality even survives the patient's death, in at least some states. Oh--and I believe it is the case, in at least the states I know about, that a therapist has an obligation to report malpracticing therapists, whether or not the patients give permission. The reasoning is that the therapist is a danger to others, hence must be reported. Not for dear Dr. Alan Gregory. The one live malpracticing therapist whose malfeasance Dr. Gregory thinks he must keep from the authorities would fall under "must report" statutes, in the places I know--and you can be pretty sure that no Board of Examiners in the world would impose any meaningful censure on a therapist who revealed the bad work of this monster. And the other (now dead) "malpracticing" therapist, whom Alan Gregory somehow believes committed a grave ethical offense by not reporting child molestation ten years after it happened, illustrates the complexities that escape Dr. Gregory. Legally, this therapist would probably NOT have been able to report what Gregory thinks he should have--precisely because of confidentiality. The patient would have had a pretty strong civil case for being reported after the statute of limitations had run out. (It's hard to defend one's self, as a confidentiality-breaking therapist, when there is no evidence of imminent harm AND no legal basis for the report!) Nonetheless, it would not be likely that the therapist would have suffered grave sanctions from his Board of Examiners if he had made the report. Civil liability and professional sanctions do not march in lockstep. So Alan Gregory, it seems to me, doesn't understand much about confidentiality, though he thinks it somehow forms a bedrock of his ethics. Of course, without his weird beliefs, he wouldn't have any reason to arrogate to himself the role of detective--he would cooperate with the cops, assuming that they know more than he about what they do for a living, just as he knows more than they about his profession. So this is a necessary plot device, but unfortunately it makes no sense. As a human, Dr. Gregory didn't really capture my sympathies, either. I thought he was pretty shallow, even feckless, really. He surely lacks insight into his boundless arrogance. I'm sorry I wasted my time on this one.
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