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Trouble
Saving lives is Jonah Stem's job-but he usually does it at the hospital, not at 3 a.m. on the dark streets of Manhattan. When he impulsively intervenes to save a beautiful woman from a man menacing her with a knife, killing the attacker in the process, he is transformed from an overworked medical student to a hero in the media spotlight. The woman, Eve Gones, is profoundly grateful, and wants to show it. Before long, they're engaged in a wildly passionate love affair. An affair that Eve doesn't want to end. Ever .
350 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published October 30, 2007
About the author
Jesse Kellerman
38 books284 followersJesse Kellerman was born in Los Angeles in 1978. His award-winning plays have been produced throughout the United States and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Most recently, he received the Princess Grace Award, given to America’s most promising young playwright. He lives with his wife in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 2, 2011
Love can take many forms in one’s life, growing and evolving as time passes into something far better and brighter than anything we might have hoped for, or it can warp into something far more twisted, pervasive and corrosive than anyone could ever imagine. Jonah Stem, a bright young medical student saves the life of Eve, a beautiful and talented young New Yorker apparently attacked by a brutal molester. Eve’s gratitude is so intense and complete that Jonah hopes for the former but begins to suspect the latter. This author once again displays his extreme talent for creating characters that develop slowly, transforming and morphing as the story develops. Jonah displays all of the exuberance of youth that becomes laden with cynicism and ultimately, hatred as the story moves ahead. The twists and turns of the plot keep the reader’s emotions in line with Jonah’s as mysteries unravel. A good read. A little disturbing but a good read for mystery fans.
April 5, 2017
I loved the original writing style in this book, although I found the lack of question marks at the ends of questions to be a bit distracting. The story was definitely a page-turner for me. It became introspective when the protagonist found himself watching a video of an event he was involved with and realized that his memory of the event differed pretty drastically from what he was seeing in the recording, and I found that to be pretty insightful given the circumstances surrounding the event. Sorry, trying not to spoil the story here...
The basic premise of the story is boy encounters girl in trouble, boy saves girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl turns into a complete psycho, boy tries desperately to get away from girl, and eventually succeeds. Nothing super original there, but the combination of writing style, incremental character development, bits of plot twisting here and there, and one extremely entertaining room-mate pulled it off for me.
Maybe I'm just enthralled with beautiful women that turn out to be creepy and evil, but I had a great time reading this book. Maybe five stars if it had more question marks and fewer F-words, but that might be a stretch.
The basic premise of the story is boy encounters girl in trouble, boy saves girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl turns into a complete psycho, boy tries desperately to get away from girl, and eventually succeeds. Nothing super original there, but the combination of writing style, incremental character development, bits of plot twisting here and there, and one extremely entertaining room-mate pulled it off for me.
Maybe I'm just enthralled with beautiful women that turn out to be creepy and evil, but I had a great time reading this book. Maybe five stars if it had more question marks and fewer F-words, but that might be a stretch.
December 27, 2011
It was a quick boring read. It's well written but... I didn't think it was a good novel. I'd try reading something else since other reviews for this Author seem to be more positive than this book's review.
March 4, 2011
It was very entertaining. I really enjoyed the characters and I couldn't believe how crazy it got, all of a sudden. I guess you never really know who anyone is.
August 16, 2025
MENTAL ILLNESS!
This story is the author’s second effort at writing a novel, and it appears to not be any improvement over the first. Written by Jesse Kellerman and published by Jove Books, New York in 2006, this novel is a mystery thriller about a third-year medical student named Jonah Stem. Jonah is working as a Med student at St. Aggy’s hospital in New York City, where and the other Med students are regularly bullied by the Residents.
The story begins with Jonah not leaving the hospital quickly enough after the end of his shift to avoid being drafted by one of the Residents to assist in a major surgery by an Attending surgeon. He rushed to the operating room before he had time to don his booties, and the case is peritonitis, which can be quite messy. Unfortunately, the patient’s bowel burst, and Jonah’s shoes were ruined by the mess of blood and tissue that ensued. He needed to buy new shoes. Luckily for him, NYC is a city that never sleeps, so he walks towards Times Square, intending to purchase a new pair of shoes. That’s when he heard the woman screaming.
Instead of running away, Jonah ran towards the screaming where he encountered an injured woman on all fours with a man standing over her threatening her. The man had a knife. Jonah had quickness and strength. When it was over, the man lay dead with a knife wound in his neck, but Jonah had a concussion from his head hitting the pavement. He managed to dial 911 and shortly was taken to the very hospital where he worked. While he was diagnosed and cleaned up, he was interviewed by a member of the District Attorney’s police staff. He told her the entire truth about the matter as he remembered it, and she told him the woman who had been attacked had survived with minor injuries. Jonah decided to go home to get some sleep, and to take the day off because of his head injury.
The surviving woman was named Eve Gones (pronounced like “Jones”) and she becomes the second woman in Jonah’s life. The first was a woman named Hannah, who Jonah loved very much. Unfortunately, Hannah’s mother passed away from a rare disease that slowly eroded the patient’s mind and memory, resulting in a severe mental illness. The disease is hereditary and terminal, and Hannah has inherited it from her mother. Hannah’s father, George comes to help take care of her, but Jonah remains committed to her and her care, traveling to her home every month to visit, and to assist George in her care. Most of the time, she no longer knows who Jonah is.
In the meantime, Eve makes contact with Jonah and initiates a frenzied sexual relationship with him. She soon becomes jealous of Jonah’s continued attention to Hannah, and the fireworks begin. It doesn’t take long for Jonah to realize that Eve is also behaving irrationally at times. So now he has two psycho women on his hands, not to mention that the brother of the man Jonah had killed was filing an expensive wrongful death lawsuit against Jonah. Jonah has a lot of troubles at this point, not to mention the task of trying to complete medical school with a sadistic resident who seems to hate him and pick on him relentlessly.
At this point I found the story to be tiring, and I did not really like it very much. I award only three of a possible five stars and a recommendation to skip his one.
This story is the author’s second effort at writing a novel, and it appears to not be any improvement over the first. Written by Jesse Kellerman and published by Jove Books, New York in 2006, this novel is a mystery thriller about a third-year medical student named Jonah Stem. Jonah is working as a Med student at St. Aggy’s hospital in New York City, where and the other Med students are regularly bullied by the Residents.
The story begins with Jonah not leaving the hospital quickly enough after the end of his shift to avoid being drafted by one of the Residents to assist in a major surgery by an Attending surgeon. He rushed to the operating room before he had time to don his booties, and the case is peritonitis, which can be quite messy. Unfortunately, the patient’s bowel burst, and Jonah’s shoes were ruined by the mess of blood and tissue that ensued. He needed to buy new shoes. Luckily for him, NYC is a city that never sleeps, so he walks towards Times Square, intending to purchase a new pair of shoes. That’s when he heard the woman screaming.
Instead of running away, Jonah ran towards the screaming where he encountered an injured woman on all fours with a man standing over her threatening her. The man had a knife. Jonah had quickness and strength. When it was over, the man lay dead with a knife wound in his neck, but Jonah had a concussion from his head hitting the pavement. He managed to dial 911 and shortly was taken to the very hospital where he worked. While he was diagnosed and cleaned up, he was interviewed by a member of the District Attorney’s police staff. He told her the entire truth about the matter as he remembered it, and she told him the woman who had been attacked had survived with minor injuries. Jonah decided to go home to get some sleep, and to take the day off because of his head injury.
The surviving woman was named Eve Gones (pronounced like “Jones”) and she becomes the second woman in Jonah’s life. The first was a woman named Hannah, who Jonah loved very much. Unfortunately, Hannah’s mother passed away from a rare disease that slowly eroded the patient’s mind and memory, resulting in a severe mental illness. The disease is hereditary and terminal, and Hannah has inherited it from her mother. Hannah’s father, George comes to help take care of her, but Jonah remains committed to her and her care, traveling to her home every month to visit, and to assist George in her care. Most of the time, she no longer knows who Jonah is.
In the meantime, Eve makes contact with Jonah and initiates a frenzied sexual relationship with him. She soon becomes jealous of Jonah’s continued attention to Hannah, and the fireworks begin. It doesn’t take long for Jonah to realize that Eve is also behaving irrationally at times. So now he has two psycho women on his hands, not to mention that the brother of the man Jonah had killed was filing an expensive wrongful death lawsuit against Jonah. Jonah has a lot of troubles at this point, not to mention the task of trying to complete medical school with a sadistic resident who seems to hate him and pick on him relentlessly.
At this point I found the story to be tiring, and I did not really like it very much. I award only three of a possible five stars and a recommendation to skip his one.
May 13, 2017
This book started off well enough, med student Jonah Stem dealing with the crappy work and long shifts common to those in medical school, whose bad day only gets worse when he comes across a woman being stabbed in a dark alley. A skirmish ensues between Jonah and the attacker that leaves Jonah injured and amnesic, and the attacker dead. I pretty much expected this book to follow a similar course as others I'd read, with the legal ramifications complicating Jonah's already full life in the hospital, and throw in the romance of the woman he saves for some spice.
Instead, the legal case becomes much of an afterthought as the romance between Jonah and Eve, the victim, takes a crazy roller coaster ride. Thankfully interspersed among encounters with Eve are Jonah's shifts in the hospital, which are what kept me reading. Kellerman drops hints pretty early on that perhaps there is more to Eve, and the attack, than Jonah realizes, it just takes Jonah a while to catch up.
I felt that the supporting characters in this book were weak too. We have Lance, Jonah's stoner roommate who livestreams the goings-on in their apartment (set in 2004, I suppose the livestreaming plot was somewhat ahead of its time, as I don't recall much livestreaming going on in my college days), but otherwise his role in the book seems muddy. Then there's Hannah, Jonah's ex, and her father George. Hannah apparently had some psychotic break during their relationship, so Jonah feels obligated to care for this shell of his former girlfriend while George sits in the living room, gets drunk, and tries to bully Jonah into babysitting Hannah during his Christmas break so that George can go on a cruise with a lady friend who knows nothing about Hannah and her condition.
Overall, I found the book very disjointed and not the thriller I expected going in. It wasn't horrible, but I'm not feeling compelled to read another book by this author.
Instead, the legal case becomes much of an afterthought as the romance between Jonah and Eve, the victim, takes a crazy roller coaster ride. Thankfully interspersed among encounters with Eve are Jonah's shifts in the hospital, which are what kept me reading. Kellerman drops hints pretty early on that perhaps there is more to Eve, and the attack, than Jonah realizes, it just takes Jonah a while to catch up.
I felt that the supporting characters in this book were weak too. We have Lance, Jonah's stoner roommate who livestreams the goings-on in their apartment (set in 2004, I suppose the livestreaming plot was somewhat ahead of its time, as I don't recall much livestreaming going on in my college days), but otherwise his role in the book seems muddy. Then there's Hannah, Jonah's ex, and her father George. Hannah apparently had some psychotic break during their relationship, so Jonah feels obligated to care for this shell of his former girlfriend while George sits in the living room, gets drunk, and tries to bully Jonah into babysitting Hannah during his Christmas break so that George can go on a cruise with a lady friend who knows nothing about Hannah and her condition.
Overall, I found the book very disjointed and not the thriller I expected going in. It wasn't horrible, but I'm not feeling compelled to read another book by this author.
May 28, 2012
I don't read much of the thriller-suspense genre but was pleasantly surprised by this book. Well-paced and nicely constructed, it held my attention without fail. As the tension built - every movement fraught with anticipation and dread - setting it down at the end of the day grew progressively harder. A nice page-turner to the last taut scene and well-delivered.
March 10, 2008
I like all of the Kellerman family! great quick read the ending was a little rushed.
August 14, 2009
Kellerman uses a good, broad vocabulary, but the story was just so-so. It reminded me of Fatal Attraction.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2011
Got this book for free, left over from a library sale...so glad I grabbed it... Sunstroke is a great book as well
August 20, 2011
Wordy, he has an excellent vocabulary. Disgusted by his graphic descriptions.
Read
November 14, 2015Too much medical terminology. Sure the main character is a medical student, but enough already. There you go, no stars.
June 23, 2015
Too sick for my taste. If it resolves in the end, I don't care.
February 7, 2016
Bad romantic encounter
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews