What readers think of Every Fifteen Minutes, plus links to write your own review.

Lisa Scottoline is a popular author; many of you have read most her books. But if you haven't read her EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES, do. It's not her latest, but it's one of her better books.

Maybe the biggest reason for that is all Scottoline's careful research. For example, the main character, Eric, is a psychiatrist. His various cases were researched so their descriptions are according to real science. Not only that, but the psychiatrist himself was researched, how he thinks and acts. EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES is a novel, but so much of it, including the legalities of a hospital system, sociopathy, police procedures, and criminal law, is authentic.

Eric is the chief of the Psychiatric Unit at a hospital. More awful things happen to him than many people could deal with. His marriage has failed, the wife of a patient in his department has threatened to sue him, a medical student has accused him of sexual harassment, etc. But he also has another issue that has to do with one of his private patients, a teenage boy, Max, who Eric has met with only three times. Yet, throughout the book Eric acts as if he knows him and what he is capable of. This does not seem real to me. Especially unreal are the lengths Eric will go to for Max's sake, all based on knowing him for those three hours.

In spite of that, I truly enjoyed EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES. That's because of, as I said, Scottoline's research. But the other big reason is simply the way she writes dialog. First, as in all her books, this is full of dialog rather than one paragraph after another of description, a problem with so many other author's books. And I like the dialog in this book because Eric usually says just the right thing, his lawyer always says just the right thing, and I learned so much about all the characters through their dialog, alone.