The Hippocratic command 'do no harm' is a golden rule for the 40-year-old, divorced physician who stars in Peter Spiegelman’s swift thriller Dr. Knox ... Adam Knox supplements his income as head of a clinic in a 'Skid Row-adjacent' L.A. neighborhood by making evening house calls as 'Dr. X,' a no-questions-asked medic for those eager to avoid press coverage or police reports ... Mr. Spiegelman has created a unique Southern California narrator-protagonist whose emergency-room crises are as exciting as car chases, whose martial arts skills are medically informed.
The trouble with Peter Spiegelman’s Dr. Knox is that — even as its sentences sometimes sparkle — the plot winds up, then down, with elaborate back stories and comic-book soliloquies substituting for any real skin in the game ... The plot gears start grinding when a woman shows up at Knox’s clinic with a young boy who’s suffering a severe allergy attack. The woman disappears as Knox is treating the child...Knox and the Brays must face off for good, and various mysteries, including the matter of the child’s parentage, are resolved in a series of declamations punctuated by righteous violence ... Then, beer in hand and joint in mouth, he’s fishing for a light when Sutter calls and off they go on another house call, the stage presumably set for a sequel.
Peter Spiegelman’s thriller Dr. Knox follows the adventures of Adam Knox, a medical doctor and an ex-NGO member who was disgraced after jeopardizing a mission in his quest to protect ordinary people from a brutal Central African militia ... His world turns upside down when a young boy, supposedly with his mother, comes into his clinic. He senses something is amiss when the boy’s supposed mother runs off without the boy and some not-so-good guys show up at his door ...premise of Dr. Knox may not be that believable; however, it is quite entertaining. Spiegelman writes in first person, from Knox’s point of view, which lends a voice to the protagonist and develops his character ...quite enjoyable with a great amount of suspense.
The Dr. Knox of the title is one of the most interesting characters you are likely to meet this year ...a kind of Ray Donovanof the ghetto, only he’s Donovan with a medical degree and without the penchant for mayhem ... A great deal of the attraction of Dr. Knox is the amount of research that Spiegelman obviously invested in writing this book... major plot thread running through Dr. Knox arises early on in the book. As the clinic is getting ready to close after a normal day of chaos, a woman brings in a young boy who has had a severe allergic reaction. Knox and his staff have barely treated him when they realize that the woman, who appears to be his mother, has left... This is a character-driven novel, however, and the concept of a guy like Knox fighting the good fight in a medically underserved area makes one hope that someone like that is really out there.
...learns the hero of Spiegelman’s noir thriller as his noble aims make him the target of Russian terrorists and shady American business moguls ... Dr. Adam Knox runs a clinic in a neighborhood he calls 'Skid Row-adjacent.' By night he cruises some even dodgier parts of town with a friend, former Special Forces agent Ben Sutter; together they perform medicine for money on junkies and gang-war casualties ... She [Elena] leaves Knox to guard her young son, Alex, makes a quick trip to the bathroom, and disappears ... The trail leads him first to Hoover Mays, a guilty-looking executive who sports bruises similar to Elena’s. But he faces a bigger threat... The plot complications get more outlandish as they go, but the dark urban atmosphere keeps the book grounded in gritty reality.
Dr. Adam Knox, the eponymous narrator of this propulsive, intrigue-filled thriller from Shamus Award–winner Spiegelman (Thick as Thieves), runs a health clinic near Los Angeles, treating addicts, transients, prostitutes, and other disenfranchised patients ... When a battered, terrified young Romanian woman brings in a very sick boy and then vanishes, Knox is left with a difficult choice: should he contact Child Protection Services, or try to track the boy’s mother down on his own? ... With the help of his friend Ben Sutter, a former Special Forces operator, Knox investigates and becomes entangled in a seedy underworld of human traffickers and Russian mobsters. Spiegelman expertly doles out the suspense, while leaving his protagonist with some difficult moral choices of his own.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
