The Office of Desire

(Riverhead Books, 284 pages)

by Martha Moody

Families are not always the people whose bloodline you share. Sometimes they are the random strangers you meet in life.

For many, the relationships that develop at work take on the dimensions of family. Sometimes these unions are just as dysfunctional as real families. Sometimes they are as supportive. Sometimes they are both.

Alicia, Brice and Caroline, the so-called ABCs, are three friends working together in a small medical practice. The trio keep the practice running for two doctors Hap Markowitz, who is trying to deal with his wife's illness, and Will Strub, who is trying to deal with first his divorce, then his new romance.

"Brice once said that if you understood our office, you understood the world," Caroline says. She thinks that's extreme. But in the end, it seems fitting.

The Office of Desire is told in the alternating voices of Markowitz, the more mature and more thoughtful of two doctors, and Caroline, the office manager who ponders the changes forged by circumstances circumstances that eventually pull apart the once close ABCs. The story begins with Caroline discussing the loss of her work family and the happiness they shared. From there it shifts in time to examine how it happened.

Alicia, a single-mom nurse, becomes involved with and then marries Strub. Brice, the office business manager, who lives with his hypochondriac mother, has no life outside the office. Caroline is the "uber-receptionist", who eventually finds the loss of a leg to cancer much easier to deal with than her fellow workers.

"We ABCs formed a concordance, and I suppose it's no surprise that the thing that first discorded us was lust," Caroline says.

The crisis brought on by Will and Alicia first as an office romance, then as unhappy newlyweds is quickly followed by Will's sudden religious zeal.

Money is the next thing that causes trouble. The practice is struggling. Strub wants to charge for things that were once done for free. He also wants to add more visits if the patient has more than one problem. And he pushes for the addition of a line of health products called "His Way With Succinium". The products, distributed by Strub's church, include Eve's Elixir for women and Adam's Advantage for men.

In the follow-up to her successful first book, Best Friends, Moody, a doctor herself, writes with an easy style and a sure eye for the details of people's lives and passions. She captures the rhythms of a group at work, their happiness and their problems.