Putty in His Hands

Rating:
Summary: A phenomenal new author
Review: We don't know much about the author, Sean Weston, pseudonym for a "prominent doctor of alternative medicine." What we do know is he can write. With an engaging main character, hip and hot young Noelle, and a unique idea, a neurologist who heals brain lesions with his bare hands, Weston takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the world of alternative medicine. A few indeterminate years in the future alternative medicine has become mainstream. Clinics flourish and hospitals routinely employ alternative practitioners alongside conventional medical staff. Amid this background of medical directors who orchestrate the rise of the alternative tidal wave, naïve but spunky Noelle accidentally lands a job as assistant to one of the movement's most influential figures. Then the leaders of the new medical paradigm begin dropping dead.

Naturally enough, some doctors are dead set against the integration of healers and holistic practitioners into the sacrosanct halls of medical institutions. The arguments that ensue threaten to engulf the forced integration in a battle of wills with high stakes for each side. Noelle, however, has more important personal issues to worry about, like her budding romance with Dr. Orlov the neurologist and death threats from his psycho ex-girlfriend.

Weston has taken the bold and ultimately successful tactic of telling this story from the first-person perspective of coquettish and plucky Noelle. This avoids the novel getting pulled into the heated polemics and dull postulates of the debate between alternative and conventional medicine, a subject Weston knows all too well. Instead the reader views alternative medicine through Noelle's interested but indifferent outsider's take on it. This allows Weston to focus on Noelle's harrowing ordeal and his plot line, which zips along at an entertaining clip. Noelle fits right into the tradition of other girls who find themselves in terrifying spots, the tortured heroines of Joyce Carol Oates novels (Man Crazy) and Hollywood's horrified but steadfast women under siege. Think Jodie Foster in Panic Room. Think Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

Weston's writing style is simple enough to originate in the mind of a 23-year-old LA girl, but Noelle's turns of phrase and witty rejoinders keep her philosophically above the fray that surrounds her, at least in hindsight. In the moment Noelle is terrorized and horrified.

Weston has provided an entertainment, a medical thriller of an unusual sort that keeps his reader engaged, even if we have a sense of where it leads. We are rooting for Noelle all the way. We never lose our focus on her, and we never lose hope that she will emerge in one piece through her ordeal.