Harmful Intent

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Malpractice lawyer Kerr debuts with an insider's thriller about America's most distrusted professionals: doctors, lawyers and insurers. For three years, Terry Winter scheduled appointments with family doctor Wallace Bondurant to follow up exams of a suspicious breast lump, but he never ordered a biopsy. Now the working-class mother of a 12-year-old daughter is dying of breast cancer, and she wants answers. She turns to attorney Peter Moss, a malpractice burnout with "Jerry Garcia neckwear," still recovering from a devastating loss in court against the same physician. But if Terry's case seems initially foolproof, it soon runs into trouble, as Moss must cope with an ethically challenged defense counsel, a judge openly hostile to malpractice claims, a demonically omniscient insurance adjuster and an elusive client inexplicably on the lam in Mexico. "You think you know your client and your facts," Moss reflects wearily, "but all you really know is your case--which is to say your own mental constructs." The more Moss learns about his client, a hard-livin' bartender taken to quoting Janis Joplin and Thoreau ("My man Henry"), the less plausible the premise becomes: how is it possible that this wised-up lady never bothered to get a second opinion? Kerr nearly tips his hand about Dr. Bondurant's secret early on, and strains credulity with the judge's bizarre disposition of the case. But readers will be riveted to his expertly drawn trial sequences--dark and sometimes painfully funny scenes of bloodthirsty lawyering and bloodless doctoring. (Apr.)

Library Journal

The adage for wannabe writers is "write what you know." Kerr, a lawyer specializing in medical malpractice cases, does just that with this first novel, a page-turning legal thriller about a dying woman's lawsuit against her highly respected doctor. Accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter, terminally ill Terry Winter walks into the office of Peter Moss, a disillusioned medical malpractice lawyer who has just returned from a six-month sabbatical in Costa Rica after losing a case involving Terry's doctor, Wallace Bondurant. Although he swore never to accept a medical malpractice case again, Moss agrees to take on Terry as a client when presented with obvious evidence of misconduct. Throughout the trial, the intriguing question is why Dr. Bondurant failed to diagnose Terry's breast cancer. Recommended for all public libraries.--Jill M. Tempest, Ocean Springs Municipal Lib., MS

Kirkus Reviews

Kerr grabs the brass ring in this first novel about a medical malpractice suit that takes every turn you can imagine, and some you can't. "MALPRA'CTICA NO MA'S," Peter Moss promises himself obsessively after his half-year escape from his Boulder partnership to Costa Rica. But try as he might, he can't walk away from Terry Winter's suit against Dr. Wallace Bondurant. It isn't just that her trusted family physician continued to treat Terry and her daughter Emmy for three years without ever recommending treatment for the lump Terry had noticed in her breast; Moss is still smarting from his failure to get a judgment against Bondurant in an earlier lawsuit. Despite Bondurant's status as president of the Colorado Medical Association—a position his victory over Moss had vaulted him into—the gurus at Moss's firm green-light the suit, and it certainly looks like a winner. Moss locates a family doctor who's happy to say that Bondurant's oversight didn't meet reasonable standards of care; Terry's oncologist offers to testify; and there's even evidence that Bondurant doctored his case notes years after the fact. So it's no wonder the defense is pressing for a quick settlement. As everything's falling into place, though, everything else is falling apart. Terry has come across on deposition as careless and irresponsible ("I want to ‘surf the flow'," she tells Moss); her estranged husband comes out of nowhere to jeopardize the case; free-spirited Terry disappears into the Mexican hinterlands; and Bondurant's smirking attorney turns out to have a few trumps of his own. As in the best legal melodramas, the back-and-forth in the courtroom is so agile and relentless that it's hard to predictwhich side will get the best of any given witness. And through it all, Moss, prodded by Terry's hard-won fatalism, begins to wonder just what it is that he's hoping to get out of the case. Kerr delivers exactly what legal-intrigue fans crave: crackling suspense up top, compelling moral problems floating beneath the surface with an iceberg's menace.