Book Review
Title: The Cuts that Cure by Arthur Herbert
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Rating: 3.5 Stars
I didn’t know anything about The Cuts that Cure when I was offered a chance to review it but the synopsis sounded interesting. We are essentially following two characters, a surgeon and a teenage boy whose lives overlap in some interesting way and I was eager to see how it played out. We are introduced to Alex Brantley, a surgeon, whose job is literally killing him emotionally as it was responsible for the break down of his last relationship. His health has also suffered as he barely sleeps and has lost a lot of weight but he thought his surgical residency would be worth it in the end only to learn it was more of the same things he would have to repeat for years to pay off his student loans. This has been wearing Alex down for years and eventually on his last night working in a particular hospital an abused baby causes him to snap leaving early and smashing up the parent’s car in the process before heading to a motel to kill himself. Luckily he doesn’t succeed and is saved by the police who are looking for him for the destruction of the car but Alex has literally crashed into rock bottom pretty hard. We are also introduced to Henry Wallis who lives in Three Rivers, Texas who has known for a long time that he is different to other children. When he was ten he developed a fascination with fire and death specifically after seeing some bunnies at a store. Henry uses his own money to buy a bunny only to hang its cage over a fire and masturbates while the rabbit fights for its life. Henry’s mother witnesses this and beats him for it before taking seeking advice but she doesn’t like what she is told and continues trying to raise Henry as normally as she can when in reality this boy needs a shit load of therapy and fast.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, I have to say that the opening wasn’t explosive but it was definitely gripping and I can’t wait to see how and why Alex and Henry cross paths. Alex has quite the mental breakdown after interacting with the abused child causing him to be suspended from practising medicine and he is sent to a psychiatric unit initially involuntarily but he chooses to stay for a month to get himself sorted. After he is released he decides to become a teacher and while he gets a job teaching science in Three Rivers where he will be teaching Henry his problems aren’t sorted yet. Alex has a lot of debt from medical school and will he is filling for bankruptcy his lawyer informs him that the judge might deny tying his student loans in with his debt because he has the option of returning to medicine which I doubt he is going to do. Meanwhile, after the incident with the rabbit Henry has gotten better at hiding his nature seeming to be normal child when he is actual getting worse as he is now looking at homeless people to take his urges out on. Watching Alex really take to teaching was nice been as he has gone through so much already but I have a feeling things are going to get worse for him as the novel progresses. In his attempts to be normal, Henry has got a girlfriend but he finds it difficult to be intimate with her unless he is thinking about horrific things like chocking her to death and when he first meets Alex as his is co-coaching the track team, we see a spark of rivalry between them but I feel that this could develop into a kinship or something far more dangerous depending on which course the novel takes.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Alex is beginning to settle into life in Three Rivers and is even making some friends both at work and outside of it. He is also developing a friendship with Henry through both cross-country and tutoring him in physics. However, due to the rumours flying around town about why he was suspended from being a doctor, Henry’s mother has a bad feeling about letting Alex get close to Henry but her husband, Sully believes she is just paranoid about the amount of gossip not even knowing if it is true. Alex is fairly surprised when he learns that his suspension is public knowledge and yet no one has asked him about why he was suspended, the only person that seems to know is his boss as it was in his file but that is just the way life is in Three Rivers. During Alex’s settling in period, Henry has been casing out a park where a lot of homeless people tend to camp out as a potential site for his first victim. By the time he makes the decision to actually kill one of them we can see he has done a lot of research into the area, how busy it is, how many homeless people are there and where they tend to camp. He has also researched forensic procedures as he is aware that is phone is untraceable if he powers it down and he knows all about DNA and physical evidence he could leave behind and does his best to minimise it. After killing the homeless man, the only thing that might compromise Henry is the fact he took several of the man’s teeth as souvenirs which if found would not only link him to the crime, if the man’s body has been discovered by then and they are treating it as a murder but his mother would also revert to the kind of woman she was when he was a small child.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, Alex’s life seems to be heading the right direction but Henry’s is about to be majorly upset. We are introduced to Detective Rodrigo Lozano who is called out about the body of a dead homeless man in the park and investigates. While everything on the surface seems to indicate the man died of natural cases, a small detail leaves Lozano to believe the man has been strangled and the post mortem confirms this, it also indicates another person was there as there is evidence the man was restrained and that his teeth has been removed after death. Lozano heads to the telephone company to search for potential witnesses or leads as the rain storm has all but destroyed any physical evidence they might have been able to collect. One of the phone numbers of that list belongs to Henry and he has a mild panic attack when he gets the message. He calls Lozano back looking to get more information and realises that a virus on his phone simulated the powered down screen when actual it was still on so he left a footprint. Henry quickly deals with the virus thanks to his tech skills involving the dark web but there is still an issue with the teeth. However, when Lozano asks him to come out to the park, Henry sees a perfect opportunity. Henry basically tricks the detective into taking him to murder site where he claims to have spotted the teeth and picked them up. Lozano clocked what he was doing but was too slow to prevent Henry’s move and he knows that if Henry claims he found them there and picked them it, it would be reasonably for his DNA to be on the teeth and the fact they weren’t found in the initial search would be put down to poor police work and the rain storm. Lozano is obviously clocked on to Henry now put proving Henry committed the murder is going to be hard and Henry is obviously confident in his safety as he leaves the scene leaving an enraged Lozano behind.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Alex gets invited by Stu down to Mexico for the weekend and Alex decides it would be nice to have some down time and agrees to go. Stu and Alex are joined by Roko and Simun and they are meeting up with Marco as a favour to Stu’s friend Luis. Everything seems to be going great for a while but Alex quickly comes to realises he really doesn’t like Marco, not only because of how he disrespects the body of a man that has died in the street but how he treats the people around him. By the time they arrive at an exclusive club, the owner is good friend with Luis and they tolerate Marco because of that everything seems to have settled down again but the alcohol is flowing and it seems to be getting to Marco. When he heads into a back room with one of the dancer, the other decide to call it a night and begin trying to head back to the villa but are prevented by a gunshot stops everything in the club. It turns out that Marco wanted a sexual favour from the girl and when he couldn’t perform he threatened her with his gun, when a bouncer notices this he tries to stop Marco and got shot in the process. Alex as he has medical training quickly examines the two people and while the girl will be left with a scar on her face from where Marco pistol whipped her, she is fine. However, the bouncer who got shot in the arm needs to get to a hospital as the bullet has broken his arm and severed an artery meaning if he isn’t treated he could die. Alex and Stu take over at this point getting everyone to where they need to be although Stu is mainly working on convincing Marco to put the gun away and leave and trying to convince the owner to let them leave which he only does because of Stu’s connection to Luis. Given how this first day has gone it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the weekend and I have a feeling that Stu might be wrapped up in some stuff that Alex is going to want to be anywhere near. While I like following Alex, Henry’s storyline is the interesting one but I am still waiting for the two storylines to come together.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, the book begins taking some hard right turns. Alex enjoys the rest of his weekend down in Mexico but Henry is fairing well during this time. Lozano during his investigation finds out that a teenage boy was in the park at the same time as Henry as he “borrowed” his father’s drone. After reviewing the footage while a person can be seen there isn’t any way to identify it as Henry but in the final seconds of the footage Lozano notices the scar that Henry has. The following day he informs Henry he is to come to the station the next morning for formal questioning and Henry knows his time is up as no matter how well he planned he didn’t account for someone to be messing around with a drone right at the time he was killing the homeless man. Henry returns home and commits suicide shocking the small town community as this is the second suicide is a few weeks and even Alex is devastated to learn of Henry’s death when he returns from Mexico. However, the hard right turn here is that shortly after this Alex gets two major blows, the first is that his appeal to have his debt erased is denied and he is basically told to go back into medicine which he doesn’t want to do. After consulting with his lawyer she basically explains because of the amount of money he owes they will make his life hell, so his only option is to return to medicine or try and create a mental health defence but either way it would involve him giving up his teaching job which he loves. The second comes on the back of this when he learns that the Sullivan’s are suing him over Henry’s death believing he is at fault. The only evidence they have is a few text message from Henry about Alex and his final Facebook post but they are also claiming that Alex and Henry had an inappropriate relationship which we know isn’t true but I have no clue what Alex is going to do or how this novel could end.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, we see all the final threads coming together and tying the novel together but I have to say I was a little disappointed by the direction the novel took in the second half as it wasn’t what I was expecting. It was interesting and thrilling to read about but after Henry’s death and I wasn’t as invested in the story as I thought this was going to be a psychological thriller about a doctor and a teenage killer which would have been amazing no matter what direction they took it in. I was expecting more of a relationship between Alex and Henry that just wasn’t there and it just left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Despite that it was still a book I read in only a couple of days so I would recommend it as the twists just keep you guessing about what is going to come next but overall it wasn’t what I was looking for.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
I received this review copy from the publisher.
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