Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I continue on my train of Freida reviews and get into Dead Med. Focusing on a group of medical students who quickly have their futures changed at a moment’s notice, it was a twisty, interesting story, but plot-wise, not a favourite of hers.
Main Characters:
Heather: Our main character, despite the book jumping through multiple POVS. Struggling to push through medical school and adding a breakup and some other issues on top doesn’t make it any easier. Is doing her stint in anatomy when someone is shot, and everyone else tries to make it through.
Abe: In Heather’s class and clearly has a crush on her. Is kind of looked down on by some of the other students due to his demeanour, but was one of the more interesting characters for me throughout.
Mason: Another student who is trying to live up to his well-renowned surgeon father, struggles to connect with the other students due to his insecurities and lack of connection due to how he grew up.
Rachel: Kind of stands off from the other students and gives vibes like she doesn’t really want to be there.
Sasha: Desperate to be on top and prove herself in school, this leads to disconnection from everyone else, as she will do what she has to do to hold her spot.
My Review
I really enjoyed some of Freida’s other medical-based thrillers, so I was surprised I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I thought I would, but it was still a really interesting read to check out. Overall, it’s a good book, and there were plenty of twists throughout that I didn’t see. I genuinely didn’t know who had fired the gun until it was shown because so many of the characters are suspicious and untrustworthy that it could have been so many throughout. While the plot was good, there were some areas that I felt weren’t really needed, and it felt a bit redundant in spots. Given that it takes place in one setting, it wouldn’t have hurt to pick the pace up a bit in some parts, but nonetheless, it was a good read to check out. I ended up landing on giving it a 7/10 rating and would probably recommend checking out some of her other medical plot ones first, but this one isn’t a bad read to pick up.
When violence, secrets, and suspicious circumstances begin unravelling around an anatomy wing in a medical school setting, multiple people become entangled in a growing mystery involving someone being shot, a history of student overdoses, betrayal, and dangerous hidden truths. As the story unfolds through several perspectives, questions begin stacking on top of each other: who can be trusted, what’s really happening behind the scenes, and how all the seemingly disconnected events tie together. Heather, our main character, struggles to make it through her anatomy portion at her medical school, where there is a history of students dying before they graduate. When shots ring out in the school, Heather and her fellow students work to stay alive while hiding their own secrets in the process. The reader is left to question who is firing the shots, who’s providing the drugs to the students, and which classmate reached a breaking point that would change all of their lives?
As mentioned earlier, Dead Med wasn’t a top favourite but was an enjoyable book all around. I think one of the aspects for me that was a bit of a downer was the jumping of plot lines and who was telling the story. While Heather is our main character, we get perspectives from other students, and while that usually isn’t a bad thing, it just added a lot of moving parts that didn’t totally need to be there. There are a lot of moving pieces in this story: drugs, violence, secrets, gunshots, multiple suspicious people, and instead of all of it building together smoothly, it sometimes felt like the book wasn’t fully focused on the thing the reader wanted to focus on. Now it totally makes sense why it would work for this book, where you wanted to provide suspicion to everyone, but it just felt like a lot sometimes. I just felt myself questioning if some things were really connected to the story or if it was filler because it didn’t always make sense if everything fit together.
Some perspectives genuinely added tension and depth, Abe especially, but others felt unnecessary and ended up pulling attention away from Heather, who clearly feels like the emotional center of the story. I almost wish the book had trusted Heather’s storyline more and stayed closer to her perspective overall.
Because, despite my frustrations with her, Heather is interesting. She’s flawed in a very Freida McFadden way, where you’re constantly questioning her judgment and motives. She’s not always easy to root for, and some of her decisions are genuinely aggravating, but she still keeps your attention because you never fully know what she’s thinking.
The book is also very twisty. I definitely thought I had things figured out at points, and while I guessed some much smaller aspects, the story still managed to surprise me in ways I wasn’t expecting. Freida is still very good at throwing readers off balance, even when you’ve read a lot of her books and start recognizing her patterns. Abe was honestly one of the stronger POVs for me. His perspective felt grounded and actually added something important to the story rather than just creating extra noise. He helped anchor some of the chaos happening throughout the plot. With everyone else, this is where the book got a little messy for me. Some perspectives worked, but others felt unnecessary and made the story feel more scattered than suspenseful. Instead of building tension, certain POVs just added confusion about what exactly we were supposed to be focusing on.
That being said, I think this plot would have worked much better for me if it had been presented in a cleaner, tighter way. There’s a good story underneath everything, it just gets buried a little under too many perspectives and competing plot threads.
Overall, not a bad thriller at all. It’s entertaining, twisty, and definitely bingeable in the way Frieda’s books usually are. It’s just not one of the first books of hers I would recommend, but you wouldn’t be disappointed either if you check this one out.
*** Don’t read any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***
The drug aspect of the book ends up not being as big (but I guess kind of big) as its originally seemed like throughout the book.
To jump right to it, it was Mason who fired the shots, killing the doctor whom the students worked under and other staff members.
In an attempt to get to the top no matter what, Sasha starts spiking Mason’s coffee with drugs so that he can’t beat her. However, this causes Mason to hallucinate and end up doing what he does.
Mason thinks that Dr. Conlon is the one giving drugs to the students, which is why he kills him, of course, in his drugged-up state. However, the doctor is actually investigating another staff member, the school counsellor, for selling the drugs to students. He is also protecting Rachel in the process, who he was having a romantic relationship.
The book ends with Rachel in the future spiking Sasha, who is now a doctor, with the same drugs she did with Mason, to avenge Dr. Conlon.
The ending was okay, but it felt very disconnected from the main character, which was strange to me, but it was for sure not an ending that I saw coming at all.
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