Book Review: Best Intentions: A Novel (Erika Raskin)

“Malpractice. Adultery. Class. Race. And murder.” All five ingredients create an intriguing plot, but the tension required in a thriller quickly evaporates. Erika Raskin’s novel opens with a prologue that jumps into the panicked and sporadic thoughts of a convicted murderer named Marti. What makes this trial unique is that Marti is a daughter to a liberal congressman, wife and mother in an unstable marriage, and a hard-working social worker.

The plot swings back and forth between the beginning and end of the timeline, slowly etching closer to the middle of the story.  The beginning of the timeline focuses on Marti and her marriage, friendships, family, career, and the end of the timeline focuses on Marti’s arrest and her interview with her lawyer.

Most of Marti’s struggles center around her marriage with Elliot. Her husband is a top physician at the local hospital (where Marti also works). Elliot has worked for ten years to become the doctor he is, and most of the ten years have been spent in the hospital working, leading meetings, or doing paperwork. Marti has raised three children on her own, and Elliot naïvely believes that family support comes best as a good paycheck. If Marti has not killed her husband, you will want to by the third chapter. Elliot is emotionally abusive and is an absent husband. He discourages his wife from working, never is home, and flakes out on important family events with lame excuses. Marti then distracts herself from her troubles by filling her time with chores, family, and social work.

Raskin is a word smith- her portrayals of anxiety as an entity with a capital A that flood and rule Marti make Marti all too familiar with readers struggling with anxiety. For instance, when Marti introduces her children to the new babysitter when Marti returns to work, she thinks,

My personal backup singers, the Anxieties, roused. They crooned concern about the sitter’s references not really being legit, then finished with a flourish about me hiring someone shady to take a job my family didn’t want me to have in the first place.

Raskin incorporates corruption within the hospital, and her picture of overly tired, overworked residents prone to malpractice is haunting and completely believable. Raskin is married to a doctor, so she has survived the grueling years behind the residency program, so her expertise as a wife lends well to her creation of Marti, who overly sympathizes for her husband and grieves for her client who struggles to have a consistent doctor when having her baby.

Although Raskin cleverly deals with popular subjects like medical malpractice and anxiety in a refreshing way, it is difficult to believe that Marti could be a murderer. The woman is perfect other than her belief that her husband is still the man she married before. Marti excels at her job while holding together a family (something even her husband could not do). She never incites an argument, never takes a sick day, and even squeezes in time to take a client to Lamaze class.

So if Marti is not emotionally capable of committing murder, how can you have a courtroom full of people believing she did it? The trial instead focuses on the social advantages Marti has and the unhappiness in her marriage. The novel becomes a muddled political drama that kept me wondering not how she was going to get out of it, but how she got there in the first place.

I read Best Intentions: A Novel by Erika Raskin (ISBN 1250101220) on Overdrive (a free app through your local library), but you can purchase the book at Amazon for $16.32 here.