The Procedure

by Peter Clement

Book Overview

"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement's first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again--combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.

With authentic detail and a surgeon's precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345482824
• ISBN13: 9780345482822
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Medical Suspence

It was authentic, thrilling, with excellent characters, plot and suspence.Peter and Veronique

The Procedure

Outstanding. High suspense. Very engaging from the first page to the end. Accurate descriptions that really put you in the shoes of the characters. Evokes emotions that draw out outspoken responses throughout the book. Wanted to read the book at red lights in traffic.

Murder and Malfeasance Make for Deadly Medicine

Peter Clement's charismatic hero, Dr. Earl Garnet, outspoken chief of ER services at St. Paul's Hospital in Buffalo, has always been something of a maverick. Deeply caring and utterly involved in his profession, he puts his patients before what's politic and his professional ethics before personal advancement. His infinite capacity for outrage in both areas is tested to the hilt when a baby arrives too late and dies in his ER because the mother's HMO had withheld not timely treatment, but their guarantee to pay for it. He subsequently publicly charges powerful Brama Health Care with "No fault murder" and opens a can of worms that rocks the hospital's hierarchy to its core. Dr. Clement's own years of experience and technical expertise in ER medicine coupled with his brilliant flair for suspenseful plotting and and non-stop action make this latest addition to an already best-selling medical series almost impossible to put down. As has been the case with his two previous thrillers, he keeps several plot-lines running in tandem. Shortly after the baby's death, a doctor who might have been associated with Brama is found brutally murdered in the hospital parking lot, and another doctor, an alcoholic friend and former colleague of Garnet's, disappears after enrolling in a secret, experimental drug rehab program which also appears to be linked to the HMO. As the financial stakes increase and pressures to cover-up and deny mount, Garnet finds himself increasingly alone in his attempts to establish a connection between these apparently disparate events that will provide tangible proof of murder, malfeasance and corruption in both the HMO and the medical establishment, bring the real culprits to justice and create the desperately needed mandate for managed care reform which he sees as a personal imperative. In order to do this, he ultimately puts his own life on the line with utterly spine-tingling results.I believe that Dr. Clement is a 'muck-raker' in the original and most honorable sense of the term. He wields his creative talent like a scapel with devastating power and accuracy to expose the multiplicity of flaws and shortcomings inherent to our present system of medical care, and it is impossible to come away from his fictional world without having some terrible concerns about the real one which we all have to deal with sooner or later ourselves.

Achilling medical thriller

The HMO informs the mother that eighteen-month-old Robert Delany had a cold and did not need ER treatment. When she called back they said use your judgment, but we will not pay for treatment unless a true emergency exists. Still worried, the mother rushes her son to the nearby Buffalo hospital, but it proves too late as the infant dies. The head of ER, Dr. Earl Garret blames the HMO Brama for the death of the child although the managed health provider worked within the law.Brama Health Care refuses to send patients to the hospital unless Earl is fired. As Earl receives the pariah treatment from peers who seen their wages drop ten percent, someone murders Dr. Sawold in the doctor parking lot. The medical community blames the homicide on Earl stirring up trouble with the unfortunate Delany case. Rather than sit idly by waiting for the police to solve the case, Earl begins making his own inquiries.THE PROCEDURE is more than just a taut medical thriller. Peter Clement makes clear his position on the current state of health care in the United States, condemning it as an outrage. The hero is a caring person who is punished for wanting to provide the best medical treatment for his patients regardless of the HMO bottom line mentality. Though one-sided, Dr. Clement still provides an exciting amateur sleuth medical thriller that will keep reader attention until the final page.Harriet Klausner