cover image Deadly Indian Summer

Deadly Indian Summer

Leonard Schonberg. Sunstone Press, $24.95 (184pp) ISBN 978-0-86534-257-6

Culture-clash and medical detective work make uneasy bedfellows in this stiff debut from physician Schonberg. After his lover is killed by her jealous husband in a murder-suicide, John Hartman flees to the backwater of Gallup, N.M., where he throws himself into his work, treating Navajos at the Indian Health Service facility and living the life of a hermit. U.S. Secretary of State Sam Spencer also makes work his ""wife and mistress"" when his family dies in a car crash. The unlikely, unlucky pair is thrown together when Spencer, on a visit to New Mexico, sees a sick Indian boy and delivers him to Hartman's hospital. When the boy's sickness turns out to be bubonic plague, the race is on to notify Spencer, who has been infected, before it is too late. Schonberg has a good feel for the hospital milieu, but that can't save his novel from its flat characters, whom Schonberg treats like galley slaves, beating away beneath his hugely implausible plot. (Oct.)