Gemini

Love must endure both distance and death in the third novel from the author of Oxygen and Healer. An intensive-care doctor in Seattle grappling with her stagnant relationship and ticking biological clock, Charlotte Reese becomes engrossed in the case of a Jane Doe delivered to her hospital comatose after a highway hit-and-run. After no one comes to the hospital looking for the new patient, Charlotte take a special interest in the case, and with the help of her boyfriend, Eric Bryson, begins to dig into Jane Doe’s past. What she comes up with forces her to confront decisions both professional and personal. In chapters that alternate with those telling Charlotte’s story, readers learn about Jane Doe, who is a tough-talking farm girl named Raney, and her first love. In Cassella’s medical-drama-meets-love-story, the inevitability of death is paramount: Charlotte sees her job as “an interminable battle against the will of the universe,” Raney’s eccentric survivalist grandfather builds a bunker to prepare for TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It), and time is shown as “a grinding mudslide, shoving everything and everyone onward.” A book at turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, it invites us to accept, if nothing else, that the only way to live is to “cling to every moment even as you [leap] into the next.” Agent: David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)