Medicine Men is another of Adams's San Francisco novels. For San Franciscans, and other Northern Californians, Alta Linda, in Southern California, which Molly compares to the women's prisons in 1930s movies, is clearly hell, with its dry, brown hills, very different from the lush greenness of northern California and the gardens of San Francisco itself. Dave even insists on taking ugly Highway 5, "that highway from hell," rather than the scenic coast drive that Molly and Felicia follow in their escape. Molly thinks that hospitals themselves, with their sterile, cell-like rooms where patients wait interminably to be tested by forbidding machinery like the MRI white tubes are "a medical hell". Even Raleigh Sanderson exclaims "Alta Linda! That scumbag hellhole of a hospital from hell!" when contemplating his prostate treatment, even though he sent patients there all the time. The antidote to Alta Linda and the medical environment generally lies...