Book Review: Little Falls

IndieBookView

Oct 3

Little Falls

by Will Werner

Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Humor

Print Length: 460 pages

Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

"This world is filled with people who walk around like they have it all figured out. They're mostly mediocre losers blessed with an undeserved confidence. I have never been a part of this club, but for the first time in my life I feel as if I have a plan."

Caught in the shadow of his father's legacy as an awe-inspiring physician, Edward Teak is the reluctant CEO of Little Falls Hospital. With the institution well past its golden years, Teak finds himself chaperoning it into decline as the town of Little Falls is swallowed up by opioids, chronic illnesses, and a general malaise.

Juggling the impossible tasks of turning his hospital around, satisfying his social-media crazed, stay-at-home wife Sam, looking after their delinquent children, and visiting his mother at the nursing home where she has taken to calling him Jeff for reasons that only her Alzheimers can explain, Edward is barely hanging on.

That is, until he hatches a plan that will pull Little Falls Hospital back from the brink long enough for Edward to sell it and turn a retirement-sized profit. Locked in his office where he avoids the poor and sick who fill his bankrupt hospital, Edward draws up a list of names—the most delinquent, money draining patients in his hospital—and resolves to kill them. Enlisting the help of shady characters, Edward careens through his makeshift plan.