I was pretty excited to read this book but quickly started to regret my choice. It took several hours for me to feel somewhat involved in the story. It felt like very little happened to keep me engaged. The main POV is that of Dr. Eric Parrish, the chief of the psychiatry unit at a major hospital. To say that Eric is incredibly ethical is probably an understatement. But he's also incredibly boring and makes so many bad choices that, honestly, by the end of the book I was hoping he would be framed for murder and sent to prison or killed. Really. The narrator didn't help matters with the inflections he chose to use during many of the conversations which made the characters sound flippant when they should have sounded serious.

The concept of the story was interesting but I didn't care for the execution. There were some twists that made me second, and third and fourth, guess myself but by that point, I didn't care who did it or why. And the ultimate why made me roll my eyes and groan.

I've heard some of her earlier books were good but I don't know that I'd bother with them after Every Fifteen Minutes. ( )

Review: Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scottoline. 4* 10/28/2022

I really enjoyed this book. The story was written very well, organized and Scottoline created great characters. I also found the chapters with information of psychopathic personality interesting and entertaining. The author also had ongoing drama throughout the book which even enhanced the story more.

Eric, one of the main characters was intelligent, sometimes conflicted because he cared a lot about his patients and his number one concern was his daughter. The story was fascinating with the twist and turns of events that happened. The story held my interest to the very end. ( )

Dr. Eric Parrish is the Chief of the Psychiatric Unit at Havemeyer General Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Recently separated from his wife Alice, he is doing his best as a single dad to his seven-year-old daughter Hannah. When he takes on a new patient, Eric's entire world begins to crumble. Seventeen-year-old Max has OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes, which makes Max a high risk patient. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found. Worried about Max, Eric goes looking for him and puts himself in danger of being seen as a "person of interest" himself.

Eric is a likeable character and he tries to do the right things for his daughter and his patients. When events in his life go from bad to worse, he tries to help by doing some things that are over-the-top. The story was interesting and entertaining but not quite believable. The loose ends are tied up nicely though. ( )

Cheesy. Disjointed. Too literal. ( )

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. ( )