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  • Location: London, Normandy

The Healing Knife

The Healing Knife

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: To Rachel, death is the enemy….

  • ISBN: 978-1782643036
  • Genre: Fiction

What you need to know before your trail

To Rachel Keyte death is the enemy. The early loss of her beloved father from heart failure ignited a single-minded determination in her: to save as many patients as she can, and to become a consultant before the age of forty. Everything else – friendship, love, empathy – is sacrificed to her obsession. Now Rachel’s surgical skills are twelve-year-old Craig’s only hope for a normal life. His mother Eve holds a deep distrust of doctors, and her son is all she has. Reluctantly, she agrees for the operation to go ahead. But surgery is never predictable, nor is a devastated mother’s terrifying reaction. Eve, it seems, wants a life for a life…

Travel Guide

A journey of a medical thriller from London to France

The section of France is perhaps the strongest location in the novel as this is part of her journey in more ways than one. She drives from Calais to France and across the region of Normandy:

The author speaks of France:

‘This is the setting for the third part of The Healing Knife, where the protagonist, cardiac surgeon Rachel, damaged both physically and mentally by a traumatic event, goes to spend two weeks with only a dog for company before she is joined by the owner, who has seen her need for solitude, rest, healing and time to think – things for which her life up to now has had little space. She works in the garden,  she falls asleep on the sunny terrace; she walks the dog, and goes to market, and meets the neighbours. She reads, but there isn’t a medical textbook or a learned article in sight. She explores the town, in particular the supermarket, and savours the local produce. Warmth and peace, fun and friends, are some of the things that her life has lacked, and bit by bit the atmosphere of rural France in summer starts a thaw, an appreciation of all she has denied herself.’

Trail Gallery

BookTrail Boarding Pass:  The Healing Knife

Destination/location: London, Normandy  Author/guide: S. L. Russell  Departure Time: 2000s

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