ER doctor Riley Brighton is expecting another typical day when she spots a mangled body on the 101. Though she leaves the scene soon after, her work at the hospital makes it easy to recognize the patterns: several other suspicious deaths have occurred recently, the victims blindfolded and pushed into traffic. Riley can’t help but investigate further, and she’s soon befriending members of LA’s most vulnerable communities: homeless youth, Latino families, and gender-nonconforming people whose identities often overlap. The investigation, however, is just as likely to put them all in danger as it is to reveal the killer.
Kat Edwards’s DEEP TRAUMA leads with an open heart. From top to bottom, the text is characterized by its sympathy for marginalized people. The focus on homelessness, on gender nonconformity, and on Latino identity pulls double duty—both characterizing the story’s LA setting and also establishing the text’s central themes. Riley is well-positioned as a protagonist, too: her work in the ER brings her into daily contact with the members of her community most in need of care. Some of her character is a little epiphenomenal (she rides a motorcycle to work, surfs in her free time, and has a few pets), but at her core, she’s well-established as smart, caring, and tenacious. That lends credence and weight to her extracurricular research into the deaths of her patients and their friends, which drives the thriller plot.
Despite its strengths, DEEP TRAUMA does have some distracting problems. There are a few homophone substitution errors (flair/flare, break/brake), for instance. Sentences are often overstuffed, including this one: “A pile of mail sat on the entryway tiles where it had landed when the postal worker popped it through the slot in the front door earlier.” (The reader knows how mail slots work; they don’t need all this explanation!) Often, sentences get twisted up in a complex of interrelated clauses like these: “The ledge where Riley had perched herself was a favorite place for anyone working on the third floor where the surgical suites were located to sit and watch the traffic in and out of the ER below.” Moments like these take up too much space on the page, and, at their worst, can make it difficult to actually identify the key idea in a sentence.
The larger frustrations, however, are structural. DEEP TRAUMA is a crime thriller overall, and there is indeed a killer; but that killer is only introduced nearly eighty percent of the way through the text, with their character and motivations remaining largely opaque. It’s a cliche, but there’s important narrative payoff in scenes where a detective (or the killer) explains how and why everything transpired. This novel doesn’t have such a scene, which leaves some plotlines feeling loose or unresolved. Meanwhile, a great deal of narrative time is spent on hospital politics and the criminal negligence of another doctor. This is its own interesting and satisfying plotline, but it’s hard to grasp how it connects to (or even just supports) the murder plot. Simplification and prioritization would make for a smoother, clearer reading experience.
Although trimming and consolidating would improve the end product, DEEP TRAUMA is still a thoughtful, brisk, and entertaining thriller that foregrounds real social issues in modern America.
Kat Edwards’s DEEP TRAUMA is a solid thriller with a plucky protagonist, interesting setup, and big-hearted values.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader