Reviews with content warning for Medical content - The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber

14 reviews

feefifofumm's review

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dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

3.0

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pugluver11's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

3.5

What I Liked:
- the narrative style was easy to follow
- lots of background info is provided to simplify complex concepts such as pharmacology, nursing skills, etc.
- takes you through the investigation from start to finish
- reenactment of phone calls added to the experience
- Shows the corruption of the American healthcare system

What I Didn't Like:
- Some of the descriptions felt overly descriptive. Obviously the names were changed, but this is about real people.

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daniellekat's review

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challenging dark slow-paced

2.5

I'm having a hard time rating this since the "story" was interesting but I think the pacing of the book took away from my enjoyment of reading this. I felt like the author didn't have a strong focus for the narrative they put together. The book seemed like a jumble of details roughly organized in chronological order but lacked...something. I'm not even sure exactly what I wanted more of, cohesiveness maybe? The second part's focus on Amy was fantastic but it drove me crazy at how many times she was referred to as the "girl". It was hard to tell how many of these and other strange wording choices were the author's or directly from source material.

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rosa_lina96's review

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dark informative tense medium-paced

3.75

The good news is that this true crime novel seems to break the trend of the police just....being frighteningly incompetent when it comes to trying to catch a killer. It's beyond satisfying to finally see a narrative where the minute that law enforcement catches a whiff of this guy acting suspicious, they're on him like fleas on a dog. No beating around the bush, no "we have to actually catch him in the act before we swoop in", no, they're fully aware that if they don't catch this guy he's going to go on and kill more people, and seeing that knowledge influence every single action they take in the process of bringing him to justice was like a breath of fresh air.

The bad news is that this book lets you know, in rather vivid detail, just how desperately the healthcare system has- and still does- try to cover up any evidence of wrong-doing by one of their staff if they think that it'll bring the hammer of bad publicity down on them. The fact that Charles was able to kill patients across nine different hospitals, the fact that several of said hospitals fully acknowledged that he was exhibiting suspicious behavior and yet didn't lift so much as a fingertip to actually meaningfully stop him from repeating the process all over again....that was nothing short of both bone-chilling and saddening to read. The fact that he could have killed over 400 people, and that his spree could have been stopped in its tracks long before it got to that point, is definitely a hard one to swallow. If it weren't for Amy and her dedication to the cause, it's possible that he could still be out there somewhere. Doesn't that make you inwardly shudder.

Thought the overall narrative was well-written and gripping enough to make it a worthwhile read, but I would have liked a bit more focus on the patients and their families overall, because let's face it, this deadbeat doesn't deserve even a single second more of anyone's time. I, for one, am glad that he's rotting in prison where he belongs.

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jhbandcats's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative mysterious sad medium-paced

4.0

I initially had a really hard time reading this because I got so frustrated and angry. The book is well-written, well-researched, and fascinating. My problem was that the medical profession - both the hospital administrators and the licensing people - allowed him to kill so many people, perhaps as many as 400, over a period of SIXTEEN YEARS without doing anything to stop him. The structures that should’ve been keeping people safe were complete failures, and the administrations only cared about liability, not patient safety.

The book is divided into two halves - the first is about the sixteen years of murder and the second is about the police investigation. That keeps the events understandable although Cullen was in so many facilities - he kept having to move between hospitals and nursing homes as he’d fall under suspicion - that it’s really difficult to keep it all straight. The police investigation and the writing of this book were a confusing tangle and both succeeded only by focusing on discrete sections at a time.

An excellent entry in true crime and the smaller subset of medical murder, but a horrific indictment of the medical profession as a whole.

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