Code Triage, by Candace Calvert

Hey all, I’m finally back for a bit! Been meaning to write this up for some time now, but I only just got it read this afternoon—anyway. Time for a review!

This time, it’s Code Triage, by Candace Calvert. The third in a series, but easily understood as a stand-alone (I know from experience, I didn’t realize until halfway through the book that it wasn’t a loner), Code Triage is a fast-paced novel for the lover of all things medically-dramatic.

Set in San Francisco, Code Triage is the story of Leigh and Nick Stathos, an ER doc and a police officer, respectively, whose marriage has fallen on the rocks. When Nick’s best friend Tony dies in a car accident, Nick foolishly turns to Tony’s sister Sam for comfort. Their short-lived affair is the final straw to an already crumbling marriage, and Leigh files for divorce.

Now there are only seven days left. Combine this deadline with a tragedy at the hospital where Leigh works, a nightmare-come-true when Leigh finally meets “the other woman”—Sam—and a myriad of other, smaller crisis, and you come up with a novel that reads like a combination of ER, a Terri Blackstock novel and One of Those Days (you know—the ones that seem to get better only to get worse in the end, only to get better later?)

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the novel. It was well-written, the characters were enjoyable, and—though it is definitely a Christian novel, no doubt about it—the elements of faith didn’t seem disconnected from the story, like they so often do in Christian literature. This wasn’t the author’s attempt to make a soapbox out of her book. She merely has characters whose faith is so imbued in them that it simply must come out in the plot.

The pacing was a bit repetitive sometimes, I’ll admit. Generally, Western-minded readers like to have a “conflict, resolve, bigger conflict, bigger resolve, ultimate conflict, ultimate resolve” kind of structure in our readings. Code Triage was more like a dizzying roller-coaster of “BAD!! Oops, ok, good…WHOA! BAD STUFF!!!! WORSE STUFF!!!! LOOK OUT!! Ok, now we can calm down for a chapter and a half—THERE IT GOES AGAIN!!!” which made me a bit glad to get it over with. What with the multiple crisis in the world of Nick’s police beat, the ER where Leigh works, the stables where she boards her horse, their personal relationship, Sam’s emotional merry-go-round, and a cast of minor character all with their own little (or big) issues, the phrase “fast-paced” is putting it mildly.

However, that said, I think that the pace of the novel serves to emphasize the setting of the crazy-fast world of the police and the doctors.

Other than that, my only issue was that there were two or three scenes where Leigh goes to do something, gets there, and thinks Wow, I really don’t know what I’m doing here or why I came, and you see that the only reason she’s there is so that the author can show a bit of the crime scene she had forgotten to describe earlier or set up yet another encounter with Sam.

On the bright side, though, there were all these cool little elements that played through the book over and over again—the lemon tree that Leigh and Nick bought on their honeymoon. The parrot next door that introduces the recurring phrase “Forever and ever!” Things like that. It was really neat to see how they all wove in together.

Like I said, overall, I enjoyed this book. Enough so that, had I the time or the money, I would be eager to go out and find other books from this author. If you enjoy the works of Terri Blackstock, Kathy Herman, Dee Henderson, or Karen Kingsbury, you would probably enjoy this fun and engaging novel.

The Brownie gives Code Triage a four-out-of-five quills.

Disclaimer: The Brownie got this book for free from the publisher in return for the review you read above. Now ignore this annoying postscript and go on about your lives, citizens.