Some Cuts Never Heal: A Lenny Moss Mystery (review)

How many times, as a grievance investigation unfolds, have you thought, "This would make a great novel"? Rejoice! Here is one that you won't be able to put down. This book works three ways: as a page-turner crime novel, as an unvarnished picture of work at a big-city hospital, and as a warts-and-all portrait of a tough, generous, possibly too cocky yet very creative union steward. Lenny Moss is a custodian. He works all over the hospital and knows everyone. A lot of people owe him their jobs. One morning an admission is denied by an HMO, leaving a room on the seventh floor listed in the computer as occupied when it is in fact empty. What an opportunity—to close the door, order lunch and dinner, use the phone. Lenny calls it "just a little joke." But minutes later, a young woman with red hair turns up lying on the bed, dead.

Sheard, a critical-care nurse who has worked in hospitals for thirty years, gives us a broad array of characters. There's a megalomaniac surgeon who gets a million-dollar fee to perform a quadruple transplant; an elderly morgue attendant who tells knock-knock jokes and whose funeral lifts the narrative to its crisis point; a pharmacist who has gone mad with love; a vivid cast of dietary aides, messengers, security guards, human resource managers, doctors, nurses, techs, and clerks, each fully identified with quickly sketched descriptions of their offices, jobs and equipment.

The reader's appetite for the specific is fully satisfied as we learn both about medical procedures, and the relationships between workers, Lenny as a steward, and the various levels of management. And there is plenty of subliminal critique of our health-care industry throughout.

This is a book that could be used to introduce people to the feel and culture of a unionized workplace. Sheard never says "Weingarten rights" or "disciplinary interview" or even "bargaining unit," but the essential framework of a workplace that has an active union is never out of sight. It is also full of examples of the bad things that happen when people are personally or professionally disrespected, and the good things that happen when they all stick together, as Lenny urges them to.

Some Cuts Never Heal is not an angry book; it is not a protest book. This is not to say that bad things don't happen even when the good guys win. After all, they are working in a hospital where people come when they are sick.

Labor educators, workers in the health care industry, mystery lovers and stewards in all kinds of workplaces would enjoy reading Some Cuts Never Heal.