Life Support

In Life Support by Robert Whitlow, a young, wealthy man by the name of Baxter Richardson plunges off the cliff with only his recent wife, Rena, as a witness. Baxter ends up on life support, in a coma, completely paralyzed. Rena does not want her husband to live. She claims it is what Baxter would have wanted, but she has another motive. In desperation she turns to Alexia Lindale, a young lawyer who specializes in divorce cases. However, Rena does not want a divorce. She wants Alexia to contest her father in law's plea that Baxter remain on life support.

Alexia finds herself in a complex situation where no one's true motives are known. It is a situation which changes her life completely.

Life Support was a phenomenal novel filled with suspense and unexpected twists. The intriguing part of this book is that the reader knows from the beginning how Baxter really fell off the cliff, but only one person in novel knows the truth. Another aspect I loved about this novel was the way God worked through music. One of the primary characters of the book is a music minister with an amazing talent from the Holy Spirit which allowed him to play beautiful pieces for the Lord. I also enjoyed wrestling with the tough question of whether the Richardson family should or should not remove Baxter from life support.

While there were characteristics I enjoyed about the book, there were a couple things that I did not particularly enjoy. One of my concerns was that when Alexia begins to feel God's work in her, she immediately feels the Holy Spirit working in her life. However, from the paragraph before and for the rest of the novel, there is no indication that she ever confessed her sins and received the pardon by relying on Christ's death and resurrection. Christ is mentioned, but never his work on the cross. Like in another Robert Whitlow novel that I have read, I think that the character's conversion could have been presented more clearly. However, despite this concern, I enjoyed the book, and I am very excited to begin the sequel, Life Everlasting.