Nurses

Rose's latest hospital-based drama (after Hospital, 1992) is stocked with enough improbable story lines and characters to fill a month's worth of E.R. episodes. Determined nurse-practitioner Marty Lamb is director of New York City's only nurse-run health facility, a clinic within a major hospital. Dedicated to providing health and maternity care to the city's poorest women, the clinic is continually targeted for closure by the hospital's chauvinistic male physicians. If that weren't enough to make Marty's workdays tension-filled, she has to contend with anti-abortion demonstrators, a nurse who is revealed to be a transsexual, missing drugs, mixed-up blood tests and mysterious gray envelopes that hold the darkest secrets of Marty and her co-workers. Her schizophrenic husband, Owen, safely locked away in a mental hospital since the night he tried to strangle her, has been released--not good news for her rekindled love affair with the handsome Dr. Paul Giordano. And then there's Marty's young friend Shayna, the 16-year-old daughter of the zealous Rabbi Ezekiel Brown. Shayna was born with spina bifida, a condition that has been carefully hidden from the world by her father. When Shayna's mother is accidentally killed by a right-to-life bullet meant for Giordano, the rabbi blames Marty for her death. With a finale involving the rabbi, Marty, Shayna, an ax and Owen, Rose's yarn, like a patient assaulted by one too many strokes, finally succumbs to a fatal burst of its overplayed melodrama. (Feb.)