It's a tough situation. Your child has end stage kidney disease. You know she needs a transplant, the doctors know she needs a transplant, but finding a suitable donor has been nigh-unto impossible. Then another doctor is brought to your attention, one who promises to find a donor, but who works in a less than favorable light.
What do you do?
That's the dilemma that forms the basis for Jennifer Blake's Clay, a story set in Louisiana, the author's home state.
Janna Kerr is the heroine and the mother faced with this terrible dilemma. Her eight-year-old daughter Lainey is very sick, and in desperate need of a new kidney. Janna, a single mom and fabric designer, has been struggling to find a way to save her daughter's life, no matter the cost. Something has to be done.
Enter Clay Benedict, son of an influential (and extremely extended) family in Turn-Coupe, Louisiana. He is an ex-veterinarian turned professional and published photographer. He's handsome, he's strong, and he just happens to be the twin brother of the man who fathered Lainey years ago. When he turns up for a visit with Janna and daughter, Janna panics, sedates him, and ties him up in the spare room.
You read that right. She ties him up. Keeps him hostage, and though the reader knows why, and certainly Janna knows why, she doesn't come out and tell Clay, directly, until he's already free. Rather than this forced stay putting Clay in a foul mood, as I expected it might, he's soon making friends with Lainey, chatting more or less amiably with Janna, and making plans to help her out, despite their rocky start.
Now. In a situation like this one, faced with decisions that have to be made about a child's life, I like to think that the child's welfare would always be my first concern. However, if someone had drugged and tied me in an out-of-the-way camp, in an area of the bayou where bodies had begun to turn up missing vital organs, I might be a little stressed out.
Not our man Clay.
Nor is our man Clay ignorant about anything, apparently. Maybe this stems from the fact that nearly every one in Turn-Coupe is related. The doctors, nurses, reporters, lawyers and law enforcement are all siblings or cousins of one form or another. Clay, having only looked at Lainey for a few moments, diagnoses her illness and that she's in real trouble. He understands all there is to know about how organ transplants work and why they don't, no doubt from his days in pre-med before he became a vet. Oh, and he's handy around the house.
Did I mention that once he escapes, he goes back to camp and pretends that he hasn't?
Needless to say, my willing suspension of disbelief was pushed past the stretching point. I'm all for beating the odds, and making the ordinarily impossible possible for the sake of a book, but there's credible, and then there's Superman.
Clay is the fourth book in the Lousiana Gentlemen series Ms. Blake is writing. The next in the series covers Wade, Clay's older brother. If Wade is as perfect as little brother Clay, then Louisiana can keep him. I'll take my hero with a little flaw on the side.
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