Knife Music: A Novel - Hardcover

Carnoy, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590203259 ISBN 13: 9781590203255

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2010

Synopsis

Dr. Ted Cogan had saved her life when he treated her in the ER six months ago-but now police detectives were questioning Cogan about her, in intimate detail. What was going on? What had she told them? That's just it, the cops said. She hadn't told them anything. She had died. Looked like a suicide. And Cogan was in a heap of trouble. Tense and twisting, Knife Music is the story of a doctor struggling to clear his name after being accused of raping and causing the suicide of a young girl. The novel pits Cogan, a forty-three-year- old surgeon and self-described womanizer, against Hank Madden, a handicapped veteran detective. From the outset it's not clear who is victim and who is victimizer, as the usually dispassionate. Madden grapples with his long- suppressed prejudices and his obsession with bringing Ted Cogan to justice at any cost. It all leads up to the most stunning surprise ending since Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent.

About this title

About the Author

David Carnoy is an executive editor at CNET and is interviewed regularly as a tech expert on radio. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and other media outlets. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. He is the author of the acclaimed thrillers Knife Music, The Big Exit, and Lucidity. His novels have sold over 100,000 copies and have been translated into Russian, Turkish, and French.

Reviews

Carnoy's debut, a thriller set in California's Silicon Valley, fails to deliver on the promise of its intriguing conceit--the degree of a doctor's legal responsibility in a patient's suicide. Shortly before hanging herself from a showerhead, 16-year-old Kristen Kroiter wrote in her diary about having sex with 43-year-old Ted Cogan, a senior trauma surgeon reputed to be a playboy. The doctor treated her in the hospital after she drove her father's Volkswagen Jetta over a curb and struck a telephone pole a few months earlier. Arrested for contributing to Kristen's death, then suspended from his job, Cogan begins playing gumshoe to clear his name. He eventually tracks many of the case's weak underpinnings to a fraternity at nearby Stanford University. Despite a varied cast of characters and some snappy plotting, the story flattens in the middle and struggles to resuscitate itself. Readers who stick around for answers to nagging questions may find it wasn't worth the wait.
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Carnoy injects an uncommon level of medical expertise, from physical trauma through hospital hierarchy, into his fine debut thriller about the fraught world of doctors. The novel certainly works as medical drama, but it is also a gripping detective story and a revealing character study about what makes docs tick. We learn, for example, that many doctors’ lack of empathy can be seen as stemming from the fact that they were trapped in labs and libraries during the crucial social-skills-gaining years. One such doctor may be Ted Cogan, a surgeon, who is questioned by detectives after the death of one of his former patients, a female high-school sophomore. Cogan saved her life after a car accident six months before. Now the girl has taken her own life, and a trail of evidence points to a sexual relationship with Cogan and a motive for him to have killed her. Veteran detective Hank Madden, in charge of the case, is a brilliantly realized secondary character. Utterly baffling until the very last page. --Connie Fletcher

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590203259
• ISBN 13: 9781590203255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352