Published by St. Martin's Press on February 14, 2012
The doctors in Oath of Office aren’t Marcus Welby. They have problems. Serious problems. Dr. John Meacham, fearful of losing his license after yelling at yet another patient, kills seven people in his office before trying to kill himself -- a fairly clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath, to which the title refers. Dr. Lou Welcome’s license was once suspended for self-prescribing amphetamines. Having been helped through recovery by a physician’s wellness program, Welcome took a part-time job with the program in addition to his part-time position in an ER. Meacham was one of Welcome’s clients. Welcome is now in trouble with his boss, who blames Welcome for failing to demand more aggressive treatment of Meacham’s mental instability. When the doctors treating Meacham all behave negligently, when Meacham’s widow endangers Welcome with her bizarrely fixated behavior, and when a chef at a local eatery sticks his thumb on a chopping block, Welcome begins to wonder whether the whole town has gone batty.
Developing alongside Welcome’s story is one involving the president, his wife, and a disgraced Secretary of Agriculture who resigned after being photographed with a naked teenage girl inside a motel room. The First Lady rather bizarrely agrees to assist an unknown Mystery Man in an effort to clear the SecAg’s name and obtain his reinstatement to his former position. To reveal how these two storylines converge would risk spoiling a clever plot; suffice it to say that you might learn more about agriculture than you knew before you began reading.
Oath of Office pairs a medical mystery with a story of political intrigue. The plot is intellectually engaging and sufficiently fast moving to keep thriller fans happy. The story seems plausible (an increasing rarity in the world of thrillers) although I’m not a scientist and might be easily fooled. The source of the bizarre behavior isn’t much of a mystery; it’s fairly obvious by the novel’s midway point. There are times when the villains do remarkably stupid things for the sake of moving the plot along, but those lapses of logic are forgivable. An improbable romantic subplot neither adds nor detracts from the story. A couple of plot twists toward the end are nifty if not entirely unexpected. One of the final scenes will appeal to fans of gruesome.
Michael Palmer’s characters are adequate if not particularly memorable. Characters who attend AA and reverently recite the serenity prayer are standard fixtures in thrillers. Like many of those characters, Welcome is a bit too self-righteous about his day-to-day sobriety. However justified it might be in the real world, pride is a deadly sin when exhibited in fiction.
The dialog Palmer gives to members of the medical community is convincing. Dialog spoken by streetwise characters suggests that Palmer has spent more time in an office than hanging out on the streets.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Palmer’s best scenes showcase Welcome’s skillful response to medical emergencies. Those passages are captivating, filled with tension and urgency. The rest of the novel is written in a capable if unremarkable prose style. One of the primary action scenes is unoriginal: any thriller set in the heartland seems to feature characters running through a cornfield while being chased by a thresher. A couple of times the narrative gets bogged down in discussions about the efficacy of AA versus psychotherapy as a treatment for substance abuse. Recovery wonks might find the discussions fascinating but I thought they were distracting. Fortunately those shortcomings are more than offset by Palmer’s creative story. On the strength of its plot and its fast-moving action, Oath of Office is a novel that most thriller fans (not just medical thriller fans) should enjoy.
RECOMMENDED