Sun 30 Apr 2017
INGRID THOFT – Brutality. Fina Ludlow #3. Putnam, hardcover, June 2015; trade paperback, December 2016.
I read Loyalty (2013), the first of Fina’s case adventures, almost three years ago, and you can read my review of it here. I am amused to see that I started my comments then by pointing out how thick the book was, 474 pages. Amused, because I was going to start my comments on this book the same way. It’s 450 pages of small print in the trade paperback edition, and it takes a lot of reading to get from beginning to end.
And what you get, if you do, is a deep-plunge immersion into two weeks of Fina Ludlow’s life, totally and completely. Not only is she working on a case with lots of offshoots to it, but she also has to deal with members of her family, mostly her dysfunctional parents — her brothers, save one, who is a known pedophile, and their families seem to be normal; a close friend who is being pressured to give up a kidney to an aunt she never knew until the aunt needed one and went looking for her; and a couple of men in her life who sleep over once in a while.
The case itself is the unexplained death of a young mother and housewife attacked in her kitchen by an unknown intruder. The only thing out of the ordinary about her is that she had been suing the university where she was a soccer player years before. She believed the school was responsible for the memory problems she’d been developing, the athletic department in particular.
Fina’s approach is a scattergun one. The police can do their investigation their own slow, methodical way. She charges right in, asking questions, stirring up dust, so to speak, and sees how it settles. Existing, it seems, on a diet of Dunkin Donuts fare, not difficult to do in the Boston area where her father is the head of the area’s best known litigation firm, Fina is on the road constantly, juggling her personal life along with whatever case she’s on.
Her smart aleck attitude gets her a long way into digging out the truth, mitigated greatly by how much she cares. It takes a while to get through as many pages as this, but to my mind, they’re well worth the investment in time.
I do have one small complaint, however. If I read the ending correctly, one aspect of the case is not yet solved at book’s end. Since every other aspect of Fina’s life is carried over from book to book, I’m assuming this will be also. If not, I’m planning on being ticked off.
Book two, which I happen to have missed, was Identity (2014). Book four, out only in hardcover so far, is Duplicity. Also of note, I’m sure, is that Brutality was the winner of last year’s Shamus award for best hardcover PI novel. A good choice.
April 30th, 2017 at 1:17 pm
I am curious about the kidney transplant subplot. I had a kidney transplant in June 2009. There were safeguards to prevent me from ever pressuring anyone to give up their kidney for me. It reminds me that how all of us know the difference from fiction and fact but that sometimes the minor points of a novel we may accept as fact are as much fiction as the rest of the book.
Not to pick on this book because we all have read great books that get a detail wrong, a detail that common knowledge has wrong. It can distract the few of those who know the fact but usually even if we care we can move on.
There are all these great mystery plot points that are more myths but accepted as facts. For example, as a diabetic I inject insulin into me five times a day. I worried about injecting air into me, The doctor pointed out you can not kill anyone by injecting air into them. Something every mystery writer does not want you to know.
April 30th, 2017 at 1:53 pm
In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Ingrid Thoft does thank a couple of medical professionals for their assistance, but goes on to say that any errors remaining are her own.
I’d have to say that in this case, you know more about the protocols for kidney transplants than anyone who is not a doctor, so my feeling is that this may be one of the errors remaining.
On the other hand, from a website called Living Donor 101, is the following statement:
“The psychological portion of the living donor evaluation is supposed to look for signs of ‘coercion’, but many transplant centers are rather lax on the matter, especially if the donor is a relative of the recipient. If you are having doubts of any kind, please disclose these to the social worker or living donor coordinator assigned to you by the transplant center. (If a living donor coordinator is not assigned, ask for one – it’s legally required by OPTN and CMS). They will offer no judgment and your statements will be kept confidential.”
http://www.livingdonor101.com/living-donor-decision.shtml
Fina’s friend’s aunt was definitely coercing, and having doubts, the friend turned to Fina for advice. It worked in terms of the story, but how accurate the process described may have been, that’s a good question.
April 30th, 2017 at 5:00 pm
When you sign up for a kidney you are put through several tests including blood work. There are dozens of checkpoints the kidney donor and patient need to match. The patient on the list that best matches the kidney gets the transplant. I was on the list for three years. You can get a match the first day you are on the list to never. You wait until one night when you get a phone call saying they have a kidney for you. There is a time limit so you drop everything and race to the hospital and are rushed to surgery.
Relatives can be a good match since you share certain genetics. My sister was not a match which relieved both of us. I didn’t want her to go through the risk for me.
I was not told who donated their kidney to me. Whoever did was a stranger and had died recently. As you noted when people get tested they can back out at any time. If they don’t want to do it, the doctor can just tell the patient they didn’t match.
April 30th, 2017 at 8:56 pm
I have looked through the book itself and was not surprised to find that the story of the friend, the aunt and the kidney must have begun in the previous book. The friend has already started the preliminary testing when we catch up with the story in this one. Unfortunately I have not read the previous book in the series.
May 1st, 2017 at 2:52 am
When my wife died a doctor tried to coerce me into donating her organs, and would not listen that it went against her Mother’s faith, so protocols do get bent.
My problem here is that I don’t have room for another detective/soap opera/bildungsroman. Maybe when Elizabeth George retires.