Beyond Belief by Kath Radford (New Generation, £7.99) (From The Northern Echo)

Beyond Belief by Kath Radford (New Generation, £7.99)

11:48am Saturday 6th February 2010

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PROBABLY not a book to take with you into hospital, this is a thriller about a doctor who calmly kills off his patients in the intensive care unit.

And Kath Radford spent much of her working life as a nurse in Darlington, ending as a senior nurse in ICU, so she knows what she’s talking about.

“When nurse Beverley Allitt killed four children in hospital, I thought ‘it couldn’t happen here’. Then there was Harold Shipman and again I thought ‘it couldn’t happen here’,”

she says.

“But then there was a case of a doctor in America who killed 140 of his patients in a unit about the same size as ours. That’s when I looked at the court papers and went through the witness statements. The reason it happened was that no one could envisage a doctor doing such a thing.

Nobody wanted to believe it. And that’s when I had my story.”

It’s a well-paced story with welldrawn characters.

Kath, 57, who nursed under another name, also has a master’s degree in psychology – always handy for a writer – and when forced to take early retirement because of a back injury thought first of painting and then of writing.

“I had published my thesis and other professional work, but not fiction.

So I joined the Inkerman Writers at the Arts Centre, in Darlington, where (mentor) John Dean was very helpful.”

She also joined an online community and then spent six months doing a thorough thematic analysis of the book. The result is a wellpaced story with well-drawn characters.

After finding the hunt for an agent traumatic, Kath opted for self publishing.

Now she’s planning a children’s book. “It took me three sleepless nights to come up with the plot,”

she says.

She already has the outline for another novel. “I’ve got the title and the first line.” That’s the hard bit done.

Just another 100,000 words to go...

Kath is doing a tour of some of the libraries in the North-East and will be at Cockerton Library, Darlington, on Tuesday, March 16, at 6.30pm.

■ Beyond Belief is available on amazon.co.uk

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