Vicki takes the cat to the vet, pays the bill and promises to return the next day to pick up the young woman to retrieve the cat. When Vicki returns, the girl does not come to the door, nor does her odd boyfriend. Vicki shrugs this off because she has bigger problems looming at the hospital. She later learns that the young witch is dead.

Vicki’s boss, Jette, has apparently vanished into thin air, leaving a trail of suspicion and several passworded files that Vicki hopes will lead to finding Jette. The other crisis that has the hospital’s publicity officer playing doctor - spin doctor that is - is the wife of a prominent surgeon on staff has slipped into a coma after a routine brow lift.

While Vicki investigates the coma patient’s case to assess the hospital’s liabilities, she runs into more questions than answers and wonders how Jette’s disappearance fits into all this and if the young witch’s death is also connected or just bad luck.

Vicki is not, sadly, a very likable heroine. She is tough, but sometimes so much so that she comes across as crude and unrefined. She swears a lot in casual conversation and in her mind which does nothing to improve her. While she needs to be tough in her position, she should be so with a certain amount of decorum and professionalism.

She is also not very accommodating with her new boyfriend Glenn, and acts as if she doesn’t care if he sticks around or not. She is a practicing attorney, but makes references to having been a nurse previously, yet after a particularly bad day, has several shots of tequila, smokes a joint and then accepts a ride on the back of Glenn’s motorcycle, all which is pretty risky behavior for someone in risk management.

The other characters around Vicki are very one dimensional and are hard to muster sympathy for when they are fired or arrested.

The hospital setting is very effective with enough technical aspects to make it believable, but not so much so to lose an unfamiliar reader. Mentions of Colorado laws are carefully cited with footnotes, a handy reference for readers.

All the threads of the mysteries are eventually tied together, albeit rather loosely. The final scene is a little bit forced, and someone who has shown as much acumen as Vicki has would have been a little too suspicious to walk into the trap.

The second book to the series is a little disappointing, although there is room for Vicki to mature and become a more likeable character as the series progresses. The premise of a hospital risk manager shows promise for the possibility of stronger, future outings.

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry