A Mistake

by Carl Shuker

In medicine, a single mistake in an otherwise spotless career can determine the rest of your life―even if the mistake was not your own

Elizabeth Taylor is a gifted surgeon―the only female consultant at her hospital. But while operating on a young woman with life-threatening blood poisoning, something goes horribly wrong. In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons' performance, her colleagues begin to close ranks, and Elizabeth's life is thrown into disarray. Tough and abrasive, Elizabeth has survived and succeeded in this most demanding, palpably sexist field. But can she survive a single mistake?

A Mistake is a page-turning procedural thriller about powerful women working in challenging spheres. The novel examines how a survivor who has successfully navigated years of a culture of casual sexism and machismo finds herself suddenly in the fight of her life. When a mistake is life-threatening, who should ultimately be held responsible?

Carl Shuker has produced some of the finest writing on the physicality of medical intervention, where life-changing surgery is detailed moment by moment in a building emergency. A Mistake daringly illustrates the startling mix of the coolly intellectual and deeply personal inherent in the life and work of a surgeon.

Genres: Fiction, Medical, Literary Fiction, Mystery Thriller

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the beginning of this novel, which takes place in Wellington, New Zealand...
I kept pausing to look up medical terminology and a sentence that I wondered about its validity.

I was enjoying the suspense in this procedural thriller, ‘and’ looking up words I was unfamiliar with.

I was especially intrigued by the brilliant surgeon, Elizabeth Taylor....(yes *Elizabeth Taylor* for which I did a double take myself).
I smirked with smiles at some of cross-talk conversations during surgery with Andrew McGrath, ( head of surgery)...so totally enjoying the story...
but needing to look up medical words I didn’t know. Slowed my reading down.
I had thoughts like... “did I need this much medical data?”...
to... “is the author showing off?”...to
“no...
Carl Shuker’s is not showing off, he’s just smarter than me - (and more experienced with medicine). My average mind was simply bumping up his.

New medical words for me:
Don’t roll your eyes at me too much... just because all of you know these medical terms):
...Voltaren: an anti inflammatory drug
...Panadeine: contains codeine and paracetamol ( ha - another word I don’t know), which works in different ways to reduce pain.
...Tachycardic: heart rate exceeds the normal resting rate.
...Peritonitis: inflammation of the lining wall of the abdomen.
...Salpingitis: infection and inflammation in the Fallopian tubes.
...Trocar: medical device during laparoscopic surgery.
...pneumoperitoneum: abnormal presence of air or other gas in the peritoneal cavity. ( around the abdominal wall).

Next: the sentence I wondered about that also took me to google:
“Did you know Richard, a recent study out of the U.S. showed women physicians have measurably better outcomes than men?
The female nurses in the novel smiled wide! 😊

I’ll let you google the men vs. women physicians if you’re so inclined-
I read a Harvard Study. Seems to be some truth to this statement. Especially women physicians working with the the elderly.

More of my sharing...
then I promise to say a little more about ‘this story’.
I enjoy watching the doctor shows on TV: “The Resident”, “New Amsterdam”, and “The Good Doctor”. I often cover my eyes though during the bloody graphic surgery scenes.
And ‘I think’ I enjoy medical thrillers -
“Rubber Necter”,by Belinda Bauer comes to mind...
but I haven’t read many medical/thrillers in my life.

For me personally - I have ‘mixed’ feelings about the the precision of the written medical details - when moving a thriller forward. Most of it I found fascinating, though...just for the pure curiosity of a physician at work during surgery. I just wish I was smarter and had already known these details.
But knowing the terminology made reading the story more fun than not knowing - so I had to do homework side-by-side reading this for maximum pleasure.

The advantage I realize in reading a medical/ fiction novel vs. a medical/fiction TV show ..., is we are not just watching a surgery on a screen -
but learning about the tools & procedures while following the plot.
A reader could skip over the medical terminology in this novel - as the basic idea - and understanding is clear - plough through the details - and just focus on the suspense. But if you want more - which I did - then I studied the use of the various unfamiliar words.
I have no use for a *trocar*... but it’s a strong visual in my brain now. Cute little tool. Ha! Its usage can creep a non-medical person out though.

Elizabeth is an accomplished- brilliant surgeon. She’s the only female consultant at her hospital.
She operates on a young girl’s abdomen who has serious blood poisoning.

“Elizabeth picked up the ‘trocar’from the tray. This one had no blade. It was a short blue pipe with taps around a handle like a thick screwdriver and she took the retractor from Robin and used the retractor like a plank to ease the pipe into the hole in the girl’s belly on a diagonal screwing it left and right, drawing the leaking fluid to help it in”.

Elizabeth’s patient dies.
It’s fascinating what plays out because Elizabeth’s entire career and reputation could be destroyed instantly. I thought about how much politics, government, and public reporting on medical statistics has power over the medical profession. Scary! The controversy in this story is thought provoking.

We get a parallel historical- retelling of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle along with Elizabeth’s story.
I understand its purpose- but not sure it was necessary. I think it’s pretty clear that the smallest mistake can create a devastating outcome.

I enjoyed this book....kinda a cautionary tale..
My first novel by Carl Shuker, ( Australian guy). Love to read more of his work.

Thank You Counterpoint Publishing...
and thank you Carl.


4.5 rating

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Mistake seems to be a novel that is either loved or loathed and in a lot of ways I can see why. I personally, found this story about medical mishap immensely affecting. Although almost every character was flawed in a way that grated, shocked, or appalled me at various moments I finished this novel with an immense amount of empathy for them. I don’t have the experience to comment on the accuracy of the portrayal of the NZ hospital system here, or the medical community at large, but this story seemed to me to capture the unrelenting pressure, and deep personal sacrifice that a career in this field demands. Shuker has a lot of interesting things to say about what we do to survive this kind of pressure and how these demands colour our relationships both within and beyond the world of work. There were scenes in this novel that made me feel physically ill, but I suspect this is exactly how Shuker wanted his reader to feel in these moments. It’s a novel that draws heavily on traditions of NZ gothic, and although I found it confronting I was both mesmerised and moved by it.

[Linda Strong · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elizabeth Taylor is a general surgeon. She is the only female consultant at her hospital, well-known and respected.

A young woman dies after surgery for a life-threatening blood poisoning. Even though she didn't make the mistake, she takes the blame. Her colleagues, her lover (a nurse), her friends... all start turning on her.

This couldn't come at a worse time .... there is a new report being generated that rates surgeons' performances .. and this will not do her any favors. She is asked to stand aside and not participate in any hospital cases.

It only takes one mistake to lose everything ....

I was somewhat disappointed with this one. As a character, I didn't much like Taylor. She comes across as very cold, arrogant, opinionated. The story premise tells of the fallout from a mistake that was made. I didn't care for all the chapters regarding the Challenger ... the mistakes that were made that led to a tragic ending. I confess .. I skipped through most of that. I found no mystery ... no suspense.

Spending most of my working life in the medical field, I can at least say I understood all the terminology. Not everyone will ... so keep a dictionary close by.

Many thanks to the author / Counterpoint Publishing / Edelweiss for the advanced digital copy of this medical fiction. Read and reviewed voluntarily, The opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immaculately, brilliantly written. I can't remember reading a novel this good - the pacing, the detail, the skill and control - in an age. Only Pip Adam's "New Animals" comes close to this, in recent year. Breathtakingly good.

[ns510reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5-5 stars

“So, she said. There are simple problems, complicated problems, and complex problems.
And then there’s just chaos.”

Loved this! I read all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons, but notice that I sometimes get put off wanting to read medical-themed books to not be reminded of work. Yet, when I do read them - especially works of fiction and creative non-fiction - I often enjoy the experience immensely. It’s like the flip side of reading #ownvoices lit - there is something in reading books you can immensely relate to or identify with, immediately sinking into the familiarity of what is inherently known to you without needing it explained.

Carl Shuker was an editor for the British Medical Journal in London, and he is principal publications adviser to the Health Quality & Safety Commission. (Also just realised he is married to Anna Smaill!) Reading an interview with him, it seems part of what he’s working on is the merits of introducing policies around transparency relating to medical outcomes here in NZ. This forms the crux of what A Mistake is all about

Elizabeth Taylor is a consultant female surgeon in her 40s, working in Wellington Hospital. She has sacrificed a lot to get to where she is, her life and personality carved to accommodate being someone of her position and caliber in what is a patriarchal, at times misogynist, setting. The health minister is wanting to introduce a name-and-shame list of surgeons and their surgical outcomes in terms of morbidity and mortality. But this is not as simplistic as it sounds, and the author demonstrates why it’s not necessarily a good idea for various reasons.

I thought he did a fantastic job at showing how it’s not any one person that keeps the show running and many things, including all the cogs in the healthcare system, that determines outcomes. Boiling it down to an eventual statistic doesn’t cover the blood, sweat, and tears, the humanity and care that goes into the decision-making process to ensure someone’s health and safety. It doesn’t cover the many hours of concern about someone’s fluid intake and urine output on the ward, even as you can’t even remember the last time you ate or even went to the toilet yourself. It doesn’t cover the sacrifice of one’s own self care and ability or inability to support those around us, the very real tragedy of burnout.

Mental health concerns are significantly high amongst health professionals for a reason. The stress is a huge part of the job and often you grow an armour to push through it, but we’re all human in the end. You hear of colleagues who commit suicide, seeing no other way out, after killing themselves for a job that doesn’t appreciate you. The bureaucrats will just find a replacement as soon as they can. Personally, I think politics should be put aside when it comes to healthcare. There should be a unified multi-partisan approach at all times, regardless of the party in power at any given time, that takes into account the concerns of frontline staff. You shouldn’t be able to campaign on things like ‘oh if you vote for us, we’ll guarantee cheaper fees!’...and then don’t even fund that promised cost behind-the-scenes, especially in a system that already runs mostly on goodwill and not enough funding. In the end, people will suffer - providers and patients alike - when it should be about well-being for all.

I also thought Shuker did a great job with Elizabeth’s character arc, why she is the way she is. Trigger warning if you’re sensitive to animal cruelty though - there was a scene I was not expecting that was brief but horrible, and I would have liked to skim past that had I known! But it did send the message home again that when you’re unable to care for your own self, due to many reasons not necessarily within your control, what it takes to survive can mean that those around you suffer.

So good I’m rambling incoherently lol - just read it!

[CanadianReader · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dr. Elizabeth Taylor, the only female surgical consultant at a a Wellington NZ hospital, performs abdominal surgery on a young woman suffering from sepsis related to a problem with an intrauterine device. Taylor’s bumbling registrar, a surgeon in training, cuts some major blood vessels when asked to insert a trocar drainage tube. An operation intended to clean out abdominal infection is extended because the serious bleed needs to be attended to. The patient dies early the following morning.

In a heavy-handed “ironic” twist, Dr. Taylor and a senior colleague have recently submitted an editorial to a high-profile medical journal. In their paper, the two have argued for surgical outcomes to be publicly reported. Now Dr. Taylor is to be “tested”. She didn’t commit the error (the trainee did), yet it is she who will be held accountable.

Apparently to drive home his message about errors, the author includes sections about the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded in 1986 only a minute and a half after being launched. When I encountered the first, out-of the blue, exceedingly dry section about the shuttle, I thought it had to be a publisher’s error. Apparently not. There were more of these sections to come.

Almost nothing about this book appealed to me, especially the main character (a stereotypically arrogant, prima-donna of a surgeon) and the less-than-nuanced writing. (Dr. Taylor requests that a thrash metal song called “Angel of Death” be played on a loop while she operates. Yes, really.)

With my eyeballs now rolling, it was difficult to focus on the text in front of me in order to complete the (reading) procedure. The narrative seemed a goner before I’d even begun. The risks of continuing outweighed the benefits. I closed ’er up in relief.

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this excellent little novel up on a recent trip to New Zealand and, wow, what a great read. A smart, unsentimental look at the fallibility of those who we, quite literally, trust with our lives. A Mistake could easily veered into the realm of melodrama but Shuker avoids the sensational to look at the human impact, as well as the frantic arse-covering of the bureaucratic machine that turns the health care engine.

[Carrie Callaway · Rating 3 out of 5]

made the cardinal sin of finishing my book on the first day of vacation…

anyway it’s like new zealand tàr for the medical community 😝

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a good coincidence. Sometimes they are stranger than fiction.

This book was first published in 2019 and was a big seller in New Zealand. (That means tiny by the rest of the world standards.) I bought a copy for my wife, who works in a hospital, and got it signed for her by the author. I have only just got around to reading it myself, five years later. Just finished it on Wednesday 5th June. And now I find out that in two days’ time the film they have made of the book will be premiered at the Tribeca Festival in New York. I knew there was a film coming, but I didn’t know it was now, or that it was in New York.

This is a great story. The surgeon, Elizabeth Taylor, with her team of doctors and nurses around her, allows a junior doctor to make an insertion during the surgery on a young patient. Things go a little wrong but because she is a fine surgeon, she patches things up and the young woman is admitted to the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). In the middle of the night the patient dies and the recriminations start.

Perhaps what is brilliant about the book, and I really wonder if this will turn up in the film, is that Carl Shuker weaves in the story of the Challenger space flight of 1986. The one that failed so spectacularly. And the reason for failure was something very simple, something overlooked and something that should have been predictable. There were consequences for those involved and some of those are eventually laid out in some very small intersecting chapters. They take nothing from the narrative of the story, they just run as a parallel example of where something can go wrong.
We also plunge very deeply into the life of Elizabeth Taylor. It is an interesting choice of name, because it is always one that is going to call attention to itself, so to use it in fiction is a double edged sword. To have such a name in real life is probably just a pain in the arse. Elizabeth is brilliant, but eccentric. You probably have to be in order to hold to power of life and death and sometimes not be a superhero. Sometimes things will go wrong.

There is only one quote I am going to give from the book – it is an entire short chapter called Two memories, but brilliant for just how poignant it is to memory and family and all those little things that make them both annoying and special:

She has two memories of her father that crowd out other memories now. She returns to them, especially when she’s tired, and studies and revises them but they never change. They reify and increase in density. The sun and moon over the dissolving territory of her young adulthood. Her father gave her his old camera when she went to medical school. He was an amateur photographer and he had bought something digital. It was a Konica he’d used since he was a young man. She never used it at university and she lost it in one of the freezing flats she’d loved in in Dunedin. She never told him, never said anything to him. Afraid. When he died she found the camera boxed up with her stuff when she cleared out his house. The leather case filmed with grey mould. She’d forgotten that she’d taken it home and left it there and he’d had it the whole time, neither of them aware it was found, or, for him, that it was ever lost.

A brilliant book, well worth the read. I hope the movie does it justice. There is so much more I could say, but not now.

[Kiwiflora · Rating 4 out of 5]

NZ novelist Carl Shuker is a former editor of the British Medical Journal. He knows his medical procedures and the opening pages of this novel graphically illustrate the drama, the tension and intimacy of an operating theatre. This is the story of highly respected, hard working, well and truly smashed the glass ceiling surgeon Elizabeth Taylor aka Loco Liz. During an operation on a young woman, a mistake is made, which may or may not have lead to her death some hours later in ICU. In the world however we live in, where blame must always be apportioned, Liz finds herself the target of the cause of the patient's death. At times she is intensely unlikeable, which also raises the question of would we have liked her the same or more if she was a top male surgeon? I doubt you can be 100% nicely-nice to get where Liz has got in her profession, having sacrificed a future of relationships and children along the way, again unlike many of her male co-surgeons. Incredibly competent and confident, she finds herself beginning to unravel as the shock that she may be held accountable for the death begins to hit her. In the world of the operating theatre where there is so much mechanisation and reliance on technology, the scalpel is still held by a human being, and whether this is the cause of death or not, the human error is the natural scapegoat. Threaded through the novel is the real life disaster of the 1986 Challenger explosion, which in the end was due to the tiniest of human errors. I felt this thread was probably not necessary, it didn't really add to Liz's story, and I found it took away from urgency and immediacy of what was going on in Liz's life. A great read, important too in this society of ours where we are constantly looking for others/anyone to be made accountable for things that go wrong.

[Boadicea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant but confronting fictional novel about medical mishap utilising a meta fictional perspective

*Ockham Book Awards Finalist*

This is a novel which transposes the consequences of a surgical procedure that does not go according to plan in a very sick septic individual who dies shortly afterwards and compares, and contrasts it, with the repercussions of the Challenger spacecraft that exploded on takeoff as a consequence of some minor imperfections that had been foreseen to be potentially dangerous.

The setting is a hospital in Wellington, New Zealand when the ruling politicians decided to focus on patient outcomes and specifically report them by individuals. The protagonist, Elizabeth Taylor, is preparing an editorial for a prestigious international journal on the problems associated with this approach.

For me, this slim novel was a compulsive page-turner but as a retired healthcare professional, the lingo and the sense of the patriarchy governing the surgical profession is a given. As a former editor with the British Medical Journal, Carl Shuker’s insider knowledge has been put to good use and his utilisation of the aeronautical perspective in addressing the different approaches used are based on current practice models of harm reduction.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

As I have had the experience of personally been blamed for causing damage when reluctantly wielding a trochar for the first time on a patient’s abdomen, this is a real issue. Fortunately, the patient survived and came to no harm but it merely drove me away from hospital practice where I doubt that I would have survived. And yes, at least one colleague committed suicide from my peer group with at least two others succumbing to psychotic illness.

Carl Shuker looks at the effect of losing a young woman postoperatively on a driven early 40s consultant female surgeon who’s life is far from perfect, yet regarded as upwardly mobile, and how quickly her career unravels. She not only loses friends, but lovers, as well as the support of her male colleagues and hospital administrators all on a false premise that she alone was responsible. Then, the media circus pile it to further her disenfranchisement. And yet, she persists in continuing to discover what actually happened in the last hours of this young girl’s life and discovers that she dies as a consequence of the illness, not the surgery. However, the death is published as a consequence of her surgical intervention rather than the illness she is suffering from.

This is a fast-moving novel that puts emphasis on acerbic staccato prose, ramping up tension and suspense. If I had one quibble, it is this:normally the coroner would be involved in this situation with a postoperative death and is nowhere mentioned!

Definition of meta:Making or showing awareness of reference to oneself or to the activity that is taking place, especially in an ironic or comic way.

Admitting insider bias, as above: 5 sparkling ✨

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent New Zealand novel that would have taken its rightful place alongside The Bone People, The Vintner's Luck and The Luminaries if it weren't for such a forgettable title.

[Chloe Fergusson-Tibble · Rating 4 out of 5]

📚📚📚📚📚REVIEW 📚📚📚📚📚
🐈: Caution: Triggering AF - don’t leave us at home alone 😿
👩🏽‍⚕️: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A Mistake by Carl Shuker
•
This book is about Elizabeth, a female surgeon in Wellington hospital that is involved in the care of a young patient. A mistake happens in surgery. The book covers the mistake, how it affects her life, and the reaction by her colleagues and the system.
•
I found the first chapter incredible - the scene is an operating theatre - and the language is descriptive and clear. It is so detailed and exactly what it’s actually like. After the mistake in theatre I found the book to be what I expected. Our health care system is sick and it touches on this theme really well. Rushed consultations, burnout, boys club of medicine (in particular surgery), sexism, and the overall harshness of a specialty like surgery. The dumb jokes that surgeons make that everyone laughs at in the operating theatre cause that’s the expectation. Surgeons hassling each other about how theres no money in public and that surgeons should all go into private practice. Registrars getting grilled by consultants and being asked to do more than they probably feel ready to do - without much support if it goes wrong. Staff being expected to be loyal to a story that makes the hospital look better even if it’s false or they don’t agree with that version of events. Surgeons who swear at each other in theatre when stuff goes wrong or just generally for effect.
•
The most disturbing theme for me was loneliness. Elizabeth seems so lonely. I couldn’t get over how unsupported she was even though she was also well respected. She would go home to this expensive empty house but often there was no one there. She barely had friends either. There was no mention of connection with her family of origin other than a late father. And yet there was this eerie sense of normality to this was of life. I really liked how well developed her character was - I felt she would act in her role as a surgeon - which I think is what a lot of females in medicine do. She was tough, brash and sarcastic when she was was hurting. And the only time she did cry was when she was alone.
•
I personally didn’t like the chapters on the Space Shuttle Challenger - I half read them in the end. Not my jam. But a clever addition to the book - linking the mistake with this historical event.
•
Read this if you want to know more about the culture of a hospital and the sickness of our health system.
•
Triggers: Suicide, Animal death.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pros: NZ setting, attempting to highlight some of the inequitable challenges for females in surgery.

Cons: This book felt like it was written in one language and then poorly translated several times. The style of writing was hard to get used to and the adjectives were bland and repetitive. It had way too much medical jargon to make it an enjoyable read for a non-medical person, and understanding the jargon didn't make it more interesting.

Did not finish.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and pacey - absolutely devoured this book in one morning. Recommend.

[Becky Loader · Rating 3 out of 5]

New Zealand is getting ready to implement a public review system that will make doctors patient mortality rates available. To say the least, doctors are keenly aware of how this will affect their lives.
Elizabeth Taylor (yes, that is really her name) is the only female surgeon at a large hospital, and she is at the center of an investigation after her assistant makes an error during an operation.

Lots of intrigue, great character development, but too much medical lingo.

The ending proves that there are still ethical people out there.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtitle: The art of arse covering.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carl Shuker's fifth novel A Mistake, is a confronting novel, one that makes the reader think deeply about human fallibility and the impulse to blame.

Based in Wellington after an international career in Tokyo and London, Shuker is one of the authors I'm going to hear at the Auckland Writers Festival. His writing appeals to me for the same reason that I like the novels of fellow Kiwi Lloyd Jones: he reinvents himself as an author with each title and each novel is completely different to the last one. According to Shuker's profile at the Academy of New Zealand Literature, The Method Actors (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), is an historical/thriller/love story set in Tokyo at the turn of the century. The Lazy Boys (Counterpoint, 2006) is about toxic masculinity in a NZ setting. Three Novellas for a Novel (Mansfield Road Press, 2011), is a trio of horror stories set in Tokyo, London and Cannes, and Anti Lebanon (Counterpoint, 2013), is apparently a political thriller and vampire story (really?!) set in Beirut and Syria. I decided to order A Mistake on the strength of reviews at Booksellers NZ and Alys on the Blog, and the book has turned out to be very interesting indeed.

At first glance, that cover image looks a bit like a lush tropical flower. But it's not, it's the innards of the human body and those protrusions are tweezers and a scalpel. A Mistake is about an emergency operation that goes horribly wrong and the patient dies, and the chronology of that narrative is punctuated by a parallel narrative about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, a preventable tragedy of seven deaths—caused by an apparently minor mistake rendered catastrophic by NASA's organisational culture and decision-making procedures. The high profile surgeon responsible for the deceased 24-year-old patient is the improbably named Elizabeth Taylor, and the issue of medical accountability is brought into sharp focus by a new system for making surgeon's outcomes publicly available online. For Elizabeth, the problems with this transparency system morph from being an abstract issue that she contests in the pages of a medical journal, to being a real life issue that impacts on her career and the careers of others in her team.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/28/a...

[Anthony O’Brien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best $30 I’ve spent. Elizabeth Taylor (not that one) is a surgeon. She’s good at her job. She’s also waging a campaign to stop publication of a league table of surgeons’ performance. How many operations, how many complications, how many deaths. She’s writing this up in a publication for a prestigious journal, but the publication is blocked by vindictive reviewers. She makes a mistake. Actually she makes numerous mistakes, but the one that costs the life of a young patient is the mistake that gives the book its title, and the story its narrative arc. Events play out and nothing much goes right for Dr Taylor (Mrs Taylor because she’s a surgeon). Carl Shuker draws on his experience in editing the British Medical Journal to write this novel. It’s all a bit obvious, especially the detailed account of the fateful operation. There’s a parallel story about the politics of publication and about the investigation of the surgical mistake. This is a novel that seems over researched. The details of surgery are unnecessarily realistic, and the account of investigation and publication are somewhat grating because they are unrealistic. So it’s the worst of both worlds. The story is interleaved by a description of the disastrous Challenger space mission. I’m not sure why, as that disaster makes no contribution to the main story, apart from being another disaster. So, altogether I was disappointed. There was too much plain reality and not enough invention.

[RoseAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished “A Mistake”. The opening 2 dozen pages totally took me in with the intriguing introduction of a semi irrational young woman, operation room banter and the slow unfolding of events that there will be an unfortunate conclusion to this particular procedure. Throw in a suicide, a very arrogant but highly competent surgeon, the calamitous death of a pet and forthcoming changes in publicizing the documentation of surgical outcomes and potentially, you have a taut medical thriller on your hands. Oh and let’s not forget the parallel recap of the Challenger tragedy of January 1986, which medically is unrelated but also due to “A Mistake”.
The potential for an exceptional telling of a story was there but it didn’t happen; at least not for me.
As someone previously observed, characters were flat and the plot did not run out smoothly. I finished the book unsatisfied but could not have read a longer version as this was not an easy read.
Sparsity can be a hugely useful writing tool but not in this case.
I am puzzled by the purchase of drywall...I can only guess it’s for repairing the damage done by poor Atticus. Oh well, life goes on doesn’t it?

[Jacki (Julia Flyte) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Taylor is a surgeon at Wellington Hospital. She's highly accomplished and arrogant, at the top of her game. She has learned to tamp down her emotions to the point where she's pretty cold in her interactions with both colleagues and loved ones. She's hard to like.

The book opens with an operation that goes wrong and the rest of the book is about the fallout from that. The theme of mistakes with fatal consequences is also explored by the parallel descriptions of the disastrous Challenger launch in 1986.

I like books that leave it to the reader to infer things without spelling everything out but I felt like this book was too sparsely told. I didn't mind at all the assumption that we would follow the medical jargon (most of it was clear to me and the few parts that weren't didn't matter). However I felt like I was being shut out of Elizabeth's thought processes and occasionally things that seemed quite pivotal were just mentioned after the fact. I would have liked more of that and less of the Challenger story.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 NZ author - did a great job - focussing on pressure on woman surgeon.
Liked the Challenge narrative running along side - built tension, something is going wrong. Ignored it later.
Felt his writing style akin to tension in Elizabeth. Her life style was indicative of single woman staking her in profession.
She seemed to feel the need to be combative, expecting her peers were looking for a crack in her professional career. In fact Richard’s suicide another example of the pressure they were under.
Her combative nature & life style set her peers against her. Left her alone, lonely, almost dysfunctional, staking her place in the medical world against males. Her personality flaws, her arrogance, are result of the pressure she was under, put herself under but it’s not an easy ride thru to surgeon as a female. Unreasonable of us to expecting her to be ‘nice’.

Akin to cousin, steph in NHS - ruined her life.
No she was not likeable - that was the point of the book. Interested make author took it on.

[Cadence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this, started reading it yesterday. I haven't read any Shuker before and I really like his writing style, the long run-on sentences and true to life dialogue, the amount of times people say "okay" back and forth a few times before the conversation can progress. Liz Taylor is insane and I love her. I can see why she's insane. I was holding my breath during the chapter she was up in Auckland because I knew what was going wrong but she didn't. Argh! Crazy shit. Hard to read. impossible to stop reading

I would watch the movie but not if I have to see an American woman do a NZ accent for the entire runtime lol

[Yellowoasis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written, this fairly slim volument captures the essence of hospital life. It gets to the heart of the story very quickly, which I loved. I also applaud the unapologetically kiwi setting (how irked I am when young adult books written in an obviously British setting are 'translated' to American by simply changing pounds to dollars!). This book offers no easy answers and I'm still thinking about it long after I closed the final page. Very, very good.

[Nick Iwan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second review: I found this book, dusty, under my bed and thought, perhaps it may have been something decent that had got away. It Wasn’t. It was read in 2022 and I think I may have been kind with the first review

First review: Nice to read a book based in New Zealand. A Good quick read. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I knew more about medicine and anatomy. Good to read over a lazy weekend

[Hastings75 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many people have raved about this book - but not me!

Maybe I wasn’t in the mood or simply missed the whole point of the story (I still don’t actually understand what happened after accident).

Putting it down as one of those books that just wasn’t for me.

[Jimmy Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

So relentlessly intense that it was better to just keep reading rather than stop. Spellbinding stuff. The characters from Carl Shuker novels are never easy to warm to and yet thoroughly engaging

[Katherine Mcalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping. I had a real sense of foreboding throughout.

[Johanna Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and shocking.

[Gavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

While not the most endearing of leading characters, a great story raising issues around medical practice & administrative process. Very believable & thought provoking