The Best Medicine

This well-intentioned romance, a first novel, takes on some weighty contemporary issues and then dismisses them in unrealistic ways. Fifty-five-year-old widow Maggie Carr is returning to nursing after 28 years away from the profession. Her physician husband's death in a car accident has caused her emotional pain, which is compounded by the fact that he was found in the company of a young nurse carrying his child. On her first day at a new hospital, she is surprised and wary when she learns that she will be working with Dr. Jason Knight, a former colleague of her husband's. She is attracted to Jason, but resists because she believes that all doctors are promiscuous like her husband. Jason is equally suspicious of love: many years ago, he married a woman 15 years his junior who left him shortly thereafter. One day the teenage daughter he hasn't seen since she was two shows up unexpectedly, but her lethargic behavior and unwillingness to make plans for the future worry him. Walters plugs in such up-to-date themes as safe sex and workplace sexual harassment, but offers facile solutions to complex, real-life problems: Maggie's singlehanded unmasking of a doctor, who has been fondling nurses for decades, is unconvincing. Walters also presents numerous coincidences--Maggie and Jason not only work together but live in neighboring condominiums. (July)