Jesse Kellerman, Trouble

Third-year medical student Jonah Stem, finally escaped from the hospital after some 18 hours on the floor, forgoes going home to sleep in order to buy himself a new pair of shoes. Three A.M. finds him squishing wetly through Times Square on his quest, his sodden Rockport Walkers irretrievably soiled by spillage from a patient's burst peritoneum. And so it is that he finds himself in the right place to hear a young woman screaming. He bursts on the scene to save her from a knife-wielding attacker, surprising himself, surprising her even more.

Jonah is a good guy suffering under considerable stress at the outset of Jesse Kellerman's Trouble. The demands of med school—sleep deprivation, malevolent residents poised to humiliate him—are coupled with the obligation he feels toward his former fiancée, now chronically ill. Saving the life of a pretty woman in the middle of the night, it turns out, makes things much, much worse for him.

The storyline of Kellerman's book is a good one: what happens when a Good Samaritan finds that the damsel in distress for whom he acted as hero isn't quite what she seemed? And Kellerman does a decent job of making us worry about Jonah as the danger into which he's stumbled slowly manifests itself. His story leads inexorably toward a denouement which, if predictable (Kellerman would in fact have been remiss if he hadn't brought his characters together as he did for a final showdown), is yet satisfyingly tense. Also, his principal characters are interesting: Jonah himself is likable and more than two-dimensional; Eve Gones—the would-be victim—and Jonah's roommate are both defined by their unusual dialogue; and George, the father of Jonah's former fiancée, is an interesting, multi-dimensional character, despite that he only plays a small role in the story.

There are a couple of problems with the book, however: a Yale connection doesn't fulfill its promise, and the occasional scene doesn't quite make sense. (Why did Jonah punch his roommate in the stomach?) But the big problem is one of credibility. Two pivotal scenes—in chapters 14 and 25—are so ridiculous that one simply cannot suspend disbelief. Which is disappointing, because Kellerman's Trouble has a lot going for it.