Stainless Steal Hearts by Harry Kraus

Matt Stone is a surgeon just trying to do his best in the medical field. Every day he has patients that need his special attention. But one patient in particular opens his eyes to a conspiracy.

When a pregnant woman in a car wreck is brought to the hospital, he has no other choice but to steal the premature baby out of her womb before the mother dies. After identifying the mother, he learns that the father of the baby is pro-choice candidate for Governor, Layton Redman. Layton does his best to cover up the illegitimate child, and the conspiracy Matt discovers.

Dr. Simons is a co-worker of Matt's who is in charge of new cutting-edge research-stealing the hearts out of aborted fetuses to give them to babies with heart problems.

While this seems like it would be a very good issue to try to present to the reader in a novel, Harry Kraus immediately condemns the issue and doesn't, in my opinion, give an objective view as he does in his later books.

Dr. Simons is immediately portrayed as an evil mad scientist who wants to abort all babies and steal their hearts. He incessantly uses profanity, which is denoted by symbol combinations like &#?!@. The funny thing is that this begins halfway through but once it begins it is very frequent. These such sequences litter his dialogue and are juvenile at best.

Matt Stone has little to no purpose in this book, except for completing the other half of the very cheesy romantic subplot. This romantic subplot takes up most of the book. Besides that, he is a very perfect character.

There is also a subplot portraying a couple who is struggling to have a child through all the usual methods. Unfortunately, I could tell from the first time this subplot was introduced where their baby was going to come from.

But even in all this muddle, Kraus demonstrated a small part of his deep-seeded originality that would come out later in his writing career. I would like to see him re edit this work and release it again.

The great thing is that we can look back as this and see how far Harry has come in the past fifteen years.

2 stars