A good read, lots of tension and suspense about the killer and lots of twists en route to that. Really enjoyed it and was quite surprised at the ultimate twist.

Chloe and Elton are planning a wedding and settling down in Portland. After working as travel nurses for the last few years, they are ready to start their life together. Chloe's first day on the job is unsettling when she finds out the doctor she will be working with is her ex-husband. They left things very abruptly and with many suspicious circumstances. Working with him is the last thing Chloe wants, but she wants her new life with Elton more. Soon Chloe starts to notice patients dying unexpectedly, providers dying tragically, and all signs point to her ex-husband. She needs to find a way to prove his connection so that she can cut ties with him for good. She just has to stay alive long enough to do it.

Jessica Payne does it again. The twists and turns in this one are so good. The scene with the door separating them (no spoilers...you'll know the scene when you get there) will stay with me for a long time. This book was the perfect mix of suspense, heartbreak, and hope.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC of The Good Doctor.

The Good Doctor" kept me hooked from start to finish. With its exploration of the doctor-patient relationship and the power of compassion, this book is a must-read for fans of medical dramas.
Experience a thrilling medical suspense story that will leave you questioning everything and everyone. With a fast-paced narrative, the tension and suspense escalate as you delve deeper into the plot. The dual point of view adds an engaging twist, blending elements of romantic suspense with the gripping mystery and psychological thriller elements

4⭐
Genre ~ medical thriller
Setting ~ Portland, Oregon
Publication date ~ June 14, 2023
Est Page Count ~ 382 (p + 83 chapters)
Audio length ~ 10 hours 41 minutes
Narrators ~ Lisa Rost-Welling, Josh Wichard
POV ~ single 1st & 3rd, present tense
Featuring ~ dual timeline ~ now & then
CW from the author ~ (view spoiler)

Chloe & fiance, Elton, move together to Portland for nursing jobs in the same hospital. It just so happens that her ex husband, Jameson, is a doctor on staff there. It's been a few years since she left him a note saying they were over. Will they be able to work together again when they each hold secrets about their past?

A high number of patients are dying soon after they've signed a DNR. Could there be a serial killer on the loose or are these deaths just a coincidence?

Love me a nice medical serial killer thriller and this one fits the bill. The conclusion is not shocking really, but it's super fast paced, engaging and well written. Give this author a try if you haven't already.

Side note ~ I found it odd that Chloe changed her last name before they were married.

I received a complimentary copy of this book "The Good Doctor" and all opinions expressed are my own. The book was very suspenseful and I kept thinking who is the killer? Definitely a page turner, although I did guess something about the outcome but I liked reading about all the twists and turns of the story. I would recommend this book and I definitely want to read "Make Me Disappear" by this author. My library does not have it though. Overall book was good and I'm sorry it took so long to finally read it.

A slow burn but twisty medical thriller. I didn't really connect with any of the characters but the story kept me invested enough to keep turning the page. While not my favorite from this author, still a solid read.

This was a decent read, but I found it a bit predictable. It centers on Chloe, a traveling nurse who sets down roots in a full-time role in Portland, Oregon, along with her fiance, Elton. Lo and behold, the doctor with whom she is paired is none other than her ex-husband, Jameson, who she hasn't seen in years and has no desire to see again. As the story continues, we uncover clues about what really happened during Chloe and Jameson's traumatic break-up and who else may have secrets to hide.

I had a little trouble connecting to the characters and felt frustrated with a lot of what Chloe said and did- so many problems could have been solved if people just talked to each other more (which is one of my pet peeves in books). The book is a bit of a slow burn but I did appreciate the amping up of the suspense throughout. I figured out the end twist pretty early and was a little annoyed that the characters didn't come along a little faster- I wish there had been more surprises. I thought the ending worked with the rest of the book.

Overall, I enjoyed this book but don't think it stood out all that much amongst similar books in the genre. Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If you love a medical aspect to your thrillers, you'll be pulled in to this pace-y novel full of twists. Travelling nurses are the perfect hook for. a psychological thriller and this book delivers.

Thank you Bookoutre and Netgalley.
This was a very slow burn, but I love a medical thriller so I kept going.
Once I got into the book it was full of twists and turns - as it was a bit slow to start I can only give it 3 stars. Had it been quicker it would have been 4.

This was not for me. The story was kinda slow and I couldn't connect with the characters at all. I was hoping for somethig different

"The Good Doctor" by Jessica Payne is a captivating exploration of empathy and resilience in the face of adversity, with rich character development and a compelling narrative that keeps you engaged until the very end.

#TheGoodDoctor #NetGalley
When Nurse Practitioner, Chloe Woods and her fiancé Elton, finally decide to leave the world of travel nursing and settle in Portland, Oregon they feel so lucky that they both get a job at the same hospital. That is, until Chloe ends up working with her ex-husband,Jameson who she ran from on the last night of their marriage 3 years ago after she saw him perform an unspeakable act. She hasn’t seen him since that night. When she is asked to investigate the influx of suspicious deaths at the hospital she hears rumors that Dr. James Smith’s nickname is “Dr. Death”. Knowing how he feels about, let’s say, helping people to the other side, she begins to think he is up to his old practices.
Nothing feels right to Chloe. Someone is following her. Elton is acting very jealous of the time she has to spend with Jameson. And Jameson’s twin sister, Laura, who also works at the hospital, is getting just a bit too chummy.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for giving me an advance copy.

I seriously couldn't put this book down & kept on reading it into the early hours of the morning! So many twists to keep you entertained!

I love a medical thriller and this one certainly ticks all the boxes. I was so gripped in the story that I forgot where I was. It has twists and turns so hold on tight. It's a bumpy ride.

The perfect thriller for my thriller heart. Payne gave the drama, the plot twists and the character development. i LOVED reading this book to see how it ended and it did not dissapoint.

The audiobook narrators were fantastic!

Sadly this book was extremely predictable, and I found the FMC to be SO stupid, and irritatingly slow, when I thought things were so incredibly obvious. (Another irritating thing: The FMC always uses the word "provider" instead of "staff". UGH!!!) The FMC also did a LOT of assuming and jumping to conclusions, which annoyed me greatly also because she just assumed she knew things. I actually almost laughed near the end when she was shocked that she had "jumped to conclusions".

The plot itself was really good, I just would have enjoyed it more if it wasn't so obvious what was going on.

Despite all this I just got the e-ARC for Jessica Payne's newest release "Never Trust the Husband". Her plot descriptions always sound so good! I hope the next one won't be as predictable though.

oh my God! this book is well paced and written well. Jessica has woven a story that grips you right from the start and keep you hooked till almost the end. I guess it was because I guessed who the really "good doctor" is, but... maybe that is just me. a good book that every thriller reader will enjoy. will recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley for and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of The Good Doctor by Jessica Payne in exchange for my honest review and opinion. I love anything that Jessica Payne writes so I was thrilled to be approved to read this! This is absolutely mind blowing and will keep you guessing what is going to happen next all the way to the last page. So many crazy twists and turns. Absolutely brilliant writing style. READ THIS ASAP!

Loved this medical Thriller!! A wonderful page turner full of twists. There was a sense of dread throughout the story that kept me on the edge of my seat. I recommend it to anyone who loves to read thrillers.

“There’s nothing between us but secrets and threats.”

I really liked Payne’s book The Lucky One so I was excited to read another one by her. I didn’t like this one as much as that one, however it had a lot less swearing in it which is a plus.

What took this one down a few notches for me was a lack of mystery, a pretty one-dimensional plot, too much coffee, and the whole oft-used scenario where someone discovers something alarming and gets mad and hurt and even though the other person is like ‘Let me explain…’ the mad/hurt/scared person says ‘No. I will not listen to potential answers. I shall flee the scene and live in confusion and misunderstandings because I just can’t even. And don’t ever touch the same ground as me.’ And if they would have just listened for five whole seconds, everything could have been avoided.


As to the lack of mystery: there is a disclaimer at the beginning which warns readers of physician-assisted suicide in the book. I suppose that’s important in case that’s a trigger for some but for a thriller it felt like the author was giving away information that lessens the suspense.

Thus, I went into it thinking the book was going to be about deaths happening in a hospital and then them realizing it was a doctor assisting patients to die. This is partially right, except we find out pretty soon that the main character, Chloe’s ex-husband (Jameson), is a doctor who does physician-assisted suicides so the ‘mystery’ becomes more about whether or not the higher death rate at the hospital is actually because of him or someone else.

And that part I figured out at like 20%. To be fair, there were a few times where I thought maybe I was wrong after all, but overall, the book didn’t feel like the twisty psychological thriller it promised to be.



Another Annoyance #1:

It’s repeated and hinted at multiple times that Chloe and Jameson have some sort of shared secret that they’re guilty of.

“I never thought I’d get a second chance at happily ever after. Not after what I did, and to someone I loved, no less.”

“After what we did, he isn’t allowed to be the love of my life.”

I got annoyed with all the cloak and dagger stuff surrounding her past because when we find out what they did, we really aren’t surprised at all.


Another Annoyance #2:

The coffee and the wine. I get that it’s the Pacific Northwest and they are coffee fanatics out there and that doctors and nurses require much coffee, but I feel like every time the author needed to move the plot forward she used coffee or wine to do that- Hey let’s get drinks! Hey, can I grab you a coffee? Can you grab me a coffee? Should we go drink coffee? Can you reinsert my coffee IV line?

If you don’t believe me, here are the facts: the word coffee is used 85 times and wine is used 87 times. Folks, that’s much times. I cross-referenced these numbers with a few other digital books I have just to see and those books used these words less than 20.

Perhaps a reader who actually likes coffee will love this, but for me it felt like coffee was it’s own character. And a bitter one at that.


Another Annoyance #3:

I feel like there were a lot of plot holes required for this story to be a thing. I just think it would be pretty hard to hide all of this at a hospital. Especially when they have had a task force created to research the high death rate and determine a cause and then results go missing and people on the task force start dying.

And the hospital has cameras. Sure the camera was off during some of the deaths, but wouldn’t that also be a red flag?

At the end when a character goes missing from their room, even though Chloe had been looking at the cameras previous times, she doesn’t check them at that point. Probably would have helped.

I’m not familiar with how hospitals work and typically I can suspend reality for the case of a book in a lot of scenarios, but considering the whole high death-rate in a hospital where people might be killing patients is the entire premise and setting for the book, I wish it would have been a more plausible situation.


Another Annoyance #4:

They have a soap dish in their bathroom at home. What kind of psychos prefer bar soap to wash their hands??


Another Annoyance #5:

Chloe finds herself in a bit of a love triangle with her ex-husband and her current fiance. She suspects her ex-husband of murdering patients, but to her fiance it just looks like she’s obsessed with her ex-husband and he’s not super thrilled they’re working so closely together.

It creates some tension between her and her fiance. But no matter how bad it gets, she is just not ‘ready’ to tell him the truth. I get how this is important to the story as Payne wrote it, but I don’t like when a story requires a character to withhold information from a person they wouldn’t. Maybe at first, but there comes a point when withholding the information makes no sense anymore.



Physician-Assisted Suicide

Because this is a major part of the book, let’s talk about this controversial subject. (Also sometimes called ‘death with dignity’ or ‘right to die’ or ‘aid in dying’- AID.)

Whether or not physician-assisted suicide is ethical or moral is not really discussed in the book, it’s kinda just a given:

“he was doing it because he believed people had the right to choose when they died when they were terminally ill. When they were actively in pain and suffering and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.”

“I also knew how much he cared about people. How much he hated to see them in pain, and I knew this came from a place of caring.”

“Jameson was offering a great kindness. A great, horrible kindness.”

“he was so honest that he told me he was doing something that while ethical, was illegal.”

PAS or AID is different than euthanasia because the patient is administering the drugs, not the physician. The physician merely prepares the drugs and is present.

PAS should also not be confused with palliative care which is care given to patients by trying to alleviate symptoms and pain as best as they can as they are dying, which with modern medicine is usually pretty effective.


This is a controversial issue that has a lot of gray areas. Like the character in the book who had ALS, an incurable disease and a painful way to die, it’s hard to think about ‘forcing’ someone to endure that in the last days of their life.

I don’t know if I land on a concrete black-and-white stance in regards to this issue as I think there are so many factors to consider in each case and medical things that I don’t know about.

But here are some thoughts and information about it. It’s worth pondering and thinking through the implications of PAS.

The main argument for PAS is patient autonomy. People want to be in control of when and how they die. It is often driven by severe pain and discomfort that they want to be free of. They believe they should have the right to choose when they die.

However, a Canadian physician interviewed in this article reveals that research studies show that the driving force for patient autonomy is less about their pain and more about their desire to control their death.

He also says, “When death itself can be considered as a medical benefit, the sky seems to be the unfortunate limit for patient autonomy, and it introduces a level of subjectivity into medicine that we wouldn’t otherwise tolerate.”

Oregon, where this book takes place, is one of the eleven states that currently allows PAS. There’s some information coming out of there that gives pause.

After a high profile PAS death in 2014 in Oregon, numbers showed that others who ended their lives this way more than doubled. PAS can actually lead to more PAS just like how the show 13 Reasons Why led to an increase in suicides in teenagers.

Research also shows that doctors weren’t present for one-fourth of the cases. It’s unknown how frequent there are complications with this method of death.

Additionally, another factor often not considered when patients are electing to die is that their judgment may be clouded by clinical depression which can be treated, but this is rarely taken into consideration.

This article listing the arguments for both sides of the issue states, “Opponents of AID are concerned that in Oregon, greater than 70 percent of patients who elect AID are elderly and have cancer, but fewer than five percent are referred to a psychiatrist or psychologist to rule out clinical depression.”

While patient autonomy is important, I am a firm believer in the sanctity of human life. And that life should not be taken. While there are some gray areas as it stands, I think the ‘slippery slope’ opposing argument of PAS is a really important one to think about.

If we start legalizing PAS when patients want to alleviate their pain- where are the lines drawn for that? At what point is it too much pain? Which diseases qualify a patient? It would easily start applying to a broader and broader patient base than it should.

As Wayne Grudem fleshes out in his book Christian Ethics, the ‘right to die’ can also easily become ‘obligated to die.’

“If euthanasia is allowed for some patients, who are suffering, then how can we prevent it from being applied to more and more patients who are suffering?… a society can quickly move from merely allowing the ‘right to die’ to the belief that there is ‘an obligation to die’ on the part of the elderly and the very ill people who are ‘draining resources’ from the society.”

He then goes on to reveal alarming statistics coming out of the Netherlands where euthanasia is legal. It is estimated that “in 1990 nearly 6000 of approximately 130,000 people who died in the Netherlands that year were involuntarily euthanized.”

While there are some examples of people who used PAS that seem right, it’s hard to deny that the legalization of PAS and euthanasia can lead to more and more death. Death of patients that could still recover, death of patients involuntarily, death of infants of children who can’t make those choices for themselves, and an overall subjective scale on what quantifies a life worth living.

Just some thoughts to ponder!


Recommendation

I won’t write Jessica Payne off because I liked her other book and this one shows me she can write without using a lot of swearing. However, there were a few things, as listed above, that made this book a hard one to recommend.

I think if you’re easy to please when it comes to thrillers, you’ll probably enjoy this.

If you’ve read a lot of thrillers and have become a bit picky, my annoyances with this one may be yours as well.

I also would not recommend if physician-assisted suicide is a trigger for you.


[Content Advisory: 17 f-words, 14 s-words, a couple sex scenes are implied but only a few sentences of content]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**