First, Do No Harm
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The past comes rearing up to bite the next generation when a son digs too deep into his family's past.... Martin Firestone can't figure why his father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school.
Then, Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict, black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents - all in a day's work for Samuel Firestone, M.D.
When Leo decided his father was covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony, followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old heads, it was too late to call off the investigation.
But there are loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking a break from his Thomas Purdue mysteries (The Midnight Special, etc.), Karp moves from antiques to medicine in this sharp, well-written crime novel. Martin Firestone, a computer technician, has decided to change his life by attending medical school. When he tells his father, renowned artist Leo Firestone, the elder Firestone reacts with tremendous anger. Shocked at his father's reaction, Martin nevertheless stands his ground. Leo then asks his son to meet him for lunch and proceeds to tell him about his paternal grandfather. Dr. Samuel Firestone, Leo's father, was a legend in Hobart, N.J., a doctor whom everyone rich or poor could count on in an emergency. He had a sixth sense about medicine and made house calls at any time of the day or night. Samuel Firestone also knew the darkest secrets of everyone in his community, and when he took his young son (Leo) on as an assistant, he inadvertently set a tragic series of events in motion. Karp's story, steeped in descriptions of 1940s smalltown life, builds to a shattering climax that will haunt readers as much as the book's characters. Fans of Robin Cook or Patricia Cornwell will find this mystery strikingly different, for it deals not in medical science but in the frailty of human love and devotion.
