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Knife Music »

Book cover image of Knife Music by David Carnoy

Authors: David Carnoy
ISBN-13: 9781590203255, ISBN-10: 1590203259
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Overlook Press, The
Date Published: July 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: David Carnoy

David Carnoy resides in New York City with his wife and children. He's an executive editor at CBS Interactive and is interviewed regularly on TV as a tech expert, appearing on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and other media outlets. This is his first novel.

Book Synopsis

Kristen Kroiter was sixteen, a high-school sophomore, when she was injured in a car accident. Dr. Ted Cogan had saved her life when he treated her in the ER six months ago — but now police detectives were questioning Cogan about her, in intimate detail. What was going on? What had she told them?

That's just it, the cops said. She hadn't told them anything. She had died. Looked like a suicide. And Cogan was in a heap of trouble.

Tense and twisting, Knife Music is the story of a doctor struggling to clear his name after being accused of raping and causing the suicide of a young girl. The novel pits Cogan, a forty-three-year-old surgeon and self-described womanizer, against Hank Madden, a handicapped veteran detective. From the outset it's not clear who is victim and who is victimizer, as the usually dispassionate.

Madden grapples with his long-suppressed prejudices and his obsession with bringing Ted Cogan to justice at any cost. It all leads up to the most stunning surprise ending since Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent.

Publishers Weekly

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. (July)

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