The Bottom Line: One night in a snowbound hospital becomes a deadly maze of misdirection and murder. Don’t miss this first-rate medical thriller.
On a stormy Thanksgiving eve at Northern Michigan General Hospital, Call Game drops its chief orthopedic resident into a shift that begins in blood and quickly becomes a test of nerve, skill, and institutional failure. Dr. Rylan Fraser arrives in the emergency department still dressed from an interrupted dinner date, and is pulled straight into the trauma bay, where a young father from a motorcycle crash is barely holding on. The circumstances would be punishing under ideal conditions, but her junior resident is unexpectedly out, and the blizzard outside is keeping her supervising senior surgeon from reaching the hospital.
Rylan faces the night’s first real moral and professional crisis – does she obey the chain of command and wait to operate on the patient, or act before he dies?
What initially could be a top-notch episode of ER or The Pitt soon becomes a locked-hospital murder mystery. Dr. Paul Bennett, the new on-call psychiatrist, receives a page that sends him to the sixth-floor surgical ward for an alleged psychiatric emergency. When he arrives, there is no psychiatric crisis, only a dead patient and nurses who say no one on the unit paged him. Similarly, Rylan is paged to check on post-operative patients whose reported symptoms do not match what the nurses have seen, and she begins finding people dead who should, by ordinary clinical expectation, still be recovering.
In Rylan, authors Graham Elder and Laura Cody have created a strong lead that readers will root for. On any ordinary day, her patients are already fragile, her decisions already consequential. She is ambitious, profane, funny, impatient, and deeply vulnerable to failure, especially when failure takes the form of a body in a hospital bed. As the night sharpens into a chess match with a predator, she proves to be relentless and clever. Her best moments come when she refuses to be held back, even while knowing that competence will not necessarily shield her from blame.
Elsewhere, emergency physician Mike Curran brings speed, sarcasm, and practical steadiness to a night that badly needs all three. Helen, the head of security, is one of the book’s most grounded presences, alert to the hospital’s habits and blind spots in a way that makes her feel indispensable rather than decorative. And to the authors’ credit, Northern Michigan General is not simply a stage for murder. It is a working organism with aging elevators, locked units, improvised workarounds, overburdened staff, gossip networks, hierarchy, fatigue and procedural gaps.Call Game succeeds because its escalation grows out of pressures already present in the setting – the blizzard, the missing backup, the fragile patients, the difficult hierarchy, and, ultimately, the horrific crimes stacking up around Rylan. The final movement pushes the novel into a more operatic register, but the escalation remains consistent with a story that has been tightening its corridors and raising its moral stakes from the start. Even at its most heightened, Call Game remains anchored by Rylan’s exhausted, stubbornly humane determination to keep acting when every system around her is failing.
