NUTCASE

Author: Charlotte Hughes ISBN: 9780515145939 3/2009 CONTEMPORARY Publisher: JOVE

The life of a psychologist is enough to drive anyone nuts... Ever since she blew up her own office with nitroglycerin (she was sure the patient was bluffing—until the vial exploded), psychologist Kate Holly has been one step away from going off her rocker. It doesn't help that she's still in love with her firefighter ex-husband—a man whose only flaw is that he seeks out burning buildings and runs inside them. They both want to patch things up, but Kate has been using sex to avoid talking, and he wants to know: Is there something she's not telling him? Well, yes, there is. Kate is about to get evicted from her office, and her best option may be to share space with her hot tub-loving ex-boyfriend, Dr. Thad Glazer. With her oddball patients, her meddling mother, and her eccentric secretary thrown into the mix—not to mention a spate of suspicious fires—will Kate put her life back together before she winds up in a padded cell?

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Charlotte Hughes is a total riot! A madcap adventure with a quirky cast of characters, NUTCASE is a fast-moving story that made me laugh out loud.

Kate is a psychologist whose own sanity is often held onto by a tenuous thread. It is amazing that, given the fact that she’s facing having her life turned even more upside down than it already is, she can find her wits for long enough to council her patients. And what a group of patients they are! I laughed over the woman who can’t go out with a man because she likes him too much, and stayed up the whole night crying because she turned him down. Where else but on the page can such nonsense make sense? But in NUTCASE anything goes—and works well.

All-night bowling, Grammy-award winning music artists and a man who gets hot when the flames fly, made me turn the pages as quickly as my fingers could move. I had to know what happened next, and when the fumes had cleared and the last disaster had been averted, I smiled because I had been totally entertained. An added bonus is that there is another Kate Holly tale in the offing… HANGING BY A THREAD is the next installment in this amusing series. I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble this advice-giving therapist finds herself in next!

Kay James