Today is my 100th day of blogging here at Terry's Thoughts and Threads ... and the health awareness prompt asks only for a simple Tag Line for my focus. It has to be: Walking to Beat the MonSter!

Rick and I walked at the end of March (MS Awareness Month) in Newburyport, Massachusetts. We had a team of fifteen, including three of my four sisters, five of my many colleagues, and some friends and in-laws as well. It was a very brisk early-Spring day, with temperatures starting in the high thirties but finishing in the low fifties. I did the full five miles, without shortcuts, and felt great afterward. Such a difference from last year, when I cut the distance  in half!  I'm feeling stronger every day, and more like me!

Back to Book Reviews!

It's been very risky for me to dedicate each day's post to the Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge, as my occasional blog readers, led here by the blog's masthead suggesting book discussions, may have wandered off. I know my regulars, like Faye and others, are here for the long run. So here's a review of another mystery involving health workers, police officers, and social workers. And as I've chosen to post it here, you know that it's a good read ... and another five star review!

 Code Triage

by Candace Calvert

This book has all the elements of good fiction: believable characters, realistic settings and powerful emotions. It begins with a married couple approaching the date their divorce will be final - a divorce process begun because the husband, a police officer, broke  his vows when his partner was killed and he went beyond consoling his partner's sister, a childhood friend.

His wife, an emergency room physician, felt betrayed and could not forgive her husband for this, and turned more toward her 'alone' time at the stables with her horse. Her husband has tried to apologize for his weakness following the loss of his partner and his empathy for his partner's sister, but the doctor is not willing to forgive and forget. She was raised in a home where "forever" didn't exist, with a mother who moved from marriage to marriage.

The sister, having known the police officer since childhood, believes she would be a better wife for him, and having a  young daughter she believes the three would be a wonderful family. She is a Child Crisis worker who monitors children living in jeopardy. When one of her clients, a single mother herself, leaves her children alone to go to her night job, and the babysitter doesn't show up as expected fifteen minutes after she leaves, and the children left alone suffer carbon monoxide damage due to a space heater operating because her furnace has been turned off for lack of payment, the mother finds her youngest non responsive, and the daughter, just a toddler herself, has just called 911 crying. 

This brings the three main characters together in a difficult collaboration. The situation escalates, the single mother's drug addicted partner and father of her children enters the scene, and shooting begins.

The author skillfully shares an introspective view of each character's emotional roller coaster, spanning from anger and resentment and love and fear and protectiveness and abandonment ... it is a murder mystery with a strong psychological focus, and well worth a reader's time and tissues.  Five Stars!