Review: Too Many Details Spoil the Plot
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2014
According to his biography, Davis Hewitt is a former Georgia Assistant Attorney General who is very familiar with the Georgia legal system in general and the Department of Corrections in particular. His wealth of knowledge is on display in "Killing the Blood Cleaner." Unfortunately, that knowledge gets in the way of telling his story far too often.The protagonist of Blood Cleaner is Dr. Jack Randolph, an Atlanta physician who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when he is framed for the death of a female friend, courtesy of the woman's employer, a corrupt local sheriff whom the dead woman was about to expose. Randolph agrees to serve as the doctor at the local prison, a post that has been vacant since the previous doctor was murdered by a vicious inmate. There, he gets into more trouble, courtesy of that same inmate and the sheriff.This plot description might make it seem like the book has a fairly straightforward storyline, when, in actuality, the plot meanders all over. Hewitt apparently views his storyline as an excuse for him to reveal all manner of details about the prison system, corruption in local Georgia politics, the ins and outs of the drug trade, Atlanta high society, the Center for Disease Control, and life in the exclusive resort area of Sea Island. As an Atlanta attorney myself, I found some of this material interesting but almost all of it irrelevant to the plot (such as pages of detailed description of the layout of the maximum security prison, details that do not figure into the plot whatsoever). Others who have less of an interest and a background for the subject matter will probably find it considerably less interesting.This overabundance of detail, when added to numerous pages of awkward, stilted dialogue (Hewitt uses characters' speeches as an excuse to continue revealing irrelevant plot details), makes it very hard for the reader to get interested in the plot. In the book's first three chapters, there's a potentially riveting sequence in which a prison inmate gets loose in the infirmary and threatens the staff. Unfortunately, this story gets buried under a mountain of extraneous detail. In fact, we have to get nearly halfway into the book before Hewitt begins discussing his central plotline in earnest.Hewitt has an interesting story to tell here, but it's one that remains obscured for much of the book. Every now and then, he gives readers some plot developments in a straightforward manner, but he then goes off on another tangent to dissipate any sense of building tension. This book was badly in need of some tight editing to prune away some of the excessive tangential descriptions and digressions. As it is, we get some good story telling and some good insider detail, but, all in all, too little of the first and too much of the second.