The Cajun Doctor

April 15, 2017
A romance-wary divorcee falls for fresh blood in New Orleans: a pediatric oncologist who's given up on medicine.Following the death of his mother from cancer and the particularly heartbreaking loss of a patient, Dr. Daniel LeDeux leaves Alaska for New Orleans after discovering that his long-lost father has Cajun roots. Turning his back on medicine for the time being, Daniel hopes meeting members of his family he never knew about will be the perfect distraction and a fresh start. Samantha Starr is rich, with stock in her family company and almost $2 million in gold bullion (a gift from her grandfather) in a safe-deposit box, and she's in the midst of a particularly nasty divorce from a verbally abusive, gold-digging doctor of an ex-husband. Samantha swears off doctors, and Daniel has no time for rich, entitled women, but Daniel's meddling aunt, Tante Lulu, knows a perfect match when she sees one. The Cajun accents are inescapable and border on cartoonish; readers will certainly never forget this is set in the bayous of New Orleans. Meanwhile, Sam's ex-husband is a one-dimensional villain whose cruelty undermines the sillier elements of the story, like an aunt obsessed with the color pink and a pot-bellied pig desperately in need of an antidepressant. Fans of Hill's writing (Good Vampires Go to Heaven, 2016, etc.) will find the nonsensical banter and caricatured cast par for the course, but newcomers may find the over-the-top absurdity of the romance to be laid on rather thick. The central conflict is thin at best, with Daniel judging Samantha too harshly, Sam assuming that all doctors are money-hungry, and Samantha's ex-husband willing to do anything, graduating from spreading misogynistic rumors to issuing threats to pulling a gun on Samantha, in order keep receiving his alimony payments. Feels more like a prolonged improv sketch than a meaningful, comedic romance.

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