Knife Music

May 10, 2010
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.

May 1, 2010
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)