The Doctor - Annie Payne || Review

 

Care giver, life saver… or cold-blooded killer?

 Running away from a past she’d rather forget, Doctor Alison Wilson has moved to a new town to take up the role of Medical Officer at failing hospital Saint Margaret’s. 

 Tasked with shaking things up, she quickly learns that things are worse than they initially seem: patient records are in disarray, staff morale is low, and there’s something afoot that she can’t quite put her finger on… 

 As Alison starts to dig into the hospital’s past, she gradually discovers a trail of lies that runs deeper and darker than she could have ever imagined. 

 There’s a cold-blooded killer in the hospital. And they’re hiding in plain sight…

I pre-ordered this book forever ago, it's very rare i pre-order one but it was 99p and sounded like the sort of thriller that I love. This was brilliant. We meet Doctor Alison Wilson who has left her old life behind and is starting fresh as medical director at St Margarets which is currently failing. Her job simply is to fix this, we meet her as she starts this task. Taken under the wing by the lead nurse, who is helping her get to grips with the dynamic of the hospital and who really isn't interested in change. What she starts to discover though is something more sinister going on and really doesn't know how to go about it.

I really enjoyed this, it was complex but not complex i couldn't understand it. I found it gripping and really twisty. I really couldn't figure out the who what why of the narrative which made it a real page-turner for me. I found i wasn't sure who was trustworthy and what was actually happening. Written in a way that is in-depth it really allows the reader to focus on the world around them. 

This was a disturbing topic to read about but done in a way that gripped the reader right up till the very end . You can tell Annie has spent her life in the NHS and it is reflected in the writing, its all believable and gives a much bigger context. 

Annie Payne spent most of her life as an NHS nurse, midwife and clinical network manager but now concentrates on writing full time. She has written extensively for television programmes such as The Bill, Doctors and Heartbeat under the name Candy Denman and has published a medical mystery series and novella under that name too.

Now she happily writes novels in a posh shed in the garden in between playing with her six grandchildren and walking her dog, Dennis the Cockapoo.