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I’m always a bit nervous when I pick up a self-published novel. I know that there’s a chance that I’ll end up with a really bad read—but I could also be pleasantly surprised by how good it turns out to be. K. Lynch’s The Other Side of the Horizon falls somewhere in between.
Dr. Jack Eisner is a top-notch emergency room physician. He saves just about every life that comes through Blakemore General Hospital. So when he’s called before hospital administrators, who blame him for a patient’s death, he’s stunned. And to make things worse, the family files a malpractice suit against him and the hospital. With his career pretty much finished, Dr. Eisner takes out his 1950s sailboat, planning to sail away from all of his problems.
As the doctor faces stormy seas and Cuban police patrols, a young defense lawyer discovers that Dr. Eisner may not have been guilty of neglect after all. But now no one can find him, and he may never learn that his name has been cleared.
Mr. Lynch has a good strong grasp on the written word, and he knows his stuff where emergency room medicine is concerned (after all, he’s a doctor himself). But the plot of The Other Side of the Horizon needs some serious rescuing. The story is underdeveloped, and it all comes together in a totally unrealistic way. The protagonist doesn’t really have to work too hard for his happy ending; it just seems to fall into his lap. Sure, we all want life to work that way, but the cold hard truth is that, most of the time, it just doesn’t. And if the author hadn’t rushed the storyline, this problem could have been fixed.
With a gutsy character who sets out alone on the ocean to think through his options, The Other Side of the Horizon had the potential to develop into a compelling story about a doctor who fights for his life on the ocean, wins, and comes home ready to fight for his career. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen here, seemingly because Mr. Lynch didn’t have either the time or the inclination to make it into something more.
However, I can tell by the smoothness and flow of his writing that Mr. Lynch definitely has talent—and, with a bit of hard work and effort, he could just become one of the future’s top medical thriller authors.
