"Faith is supposed to open your eyes. It’s supposed to take you outside of yourself."
Saving Faith by Patrick M. Garry Kenric Books
book review by Peter M. Fitzpatrick
A disgraced reporter's car is mistakenly towed away by a young man who works as a repossesser. Somehow, they develop a relationship and the young man, Jack, becomes drawn into a world of journalists populated by beautiful models and millionaires. They also encounter a nurse named Irene and a young woman named Clara who devote themselves to protecting a comatose woman named Faith. Faith's rundown hospital setting is threatened by one Lascoe Development Corporation who wants to build, among other things, a family planning clinic on the site, thereby threatening Faith's life. Emily Zailles, a leading fundraiser for the projected clinic, is gunned down, and the concomitant interplay between journalists and the hospital leads to artificially concocted lines being drawn between advocates of Zailles and the hospital. The murder of Zailles turns out to be more complex, and Clara and Jack develop a troubled relationship as more facts become known. Ultimately, Clara's mother is implicated in Faith's injury and the Lascoe Corporation is implicated in the murder of Zailles.
Both suspenseful and engaging, the author has an excellent command of plot construction and is particularly adept at character development. His viewpoint character, the young car repossessor named Jack, grew up as an orphan and his thoughts and evaluations of the worlds of both glamorous journalism and selfless health care workers are unique. His interactions with Clara, his eventual love interest, are also fresh. Meanwhile, the author's themes, ostensibly religious, are allowed a vehicle for expression in Jack's and Clara's confrontations with a "value-free" world that is late nineties America. The denouement is atypical, all the heroines essentially being killed off, and justice never really being served. Humanism, in all its guises, is subverted by the author to a Morality. His philosophical commitment to this moral stance precludes any emotional payoff at the end. The result is both disturbing and thought provoking.