Athol Dickson The Cure

The Cure

Athol Dickson

Bethany House, July 2007, $17.94, 239

ISBN 0764201638

Once he was a respected minister who taught at a prestigious school, a kind and gentle man who loved his wife and was happy to be with her as missionaries to bring Christ to a tribe known as The People. When tragedy strikes, Riley Keep felt responsible and ended up losing everything that meant something to him. He became a homeless alcoholic but in Florida he heard there was a cure for alcoholism in his hometown Dublin, Maine.

He goes there more for his friend Brice who is slowly dying from the alcohol he puts in his body. He hopes there is a cure and when he reaches Dublin he stays at a shelter run by Willa Newdale. When Willa disappears and is presumed dead, evidence points at Riley as the killer. Riley pockets an envelope that has the formula for the cure inside it. He hires a lawyer to patent the formula and sells it to a pharmaceutical company to make it available to alcoholics even as Riley cleans himself up. When he learns the cure will cost a person $5000 denying it to the people who desperately need it, Riley needs to fix it so the price is lowered.

The protagonist has hit rock bottom and finally tries to climb the ladder out of the ooze because of the two females he still loves and has missed for the last three years. Readers will wonder what made him fall so low but they will also empathize with his pain and suffering. He works hard to take care of his estranged family and he still has to change and find redemption so he can be the man he once was. his e. Riley is a good man trying very hard to make his family regain their respect for him and be proud of him.

Harriet Klausner