This isn't her first experience with loss or trauma - her husband died early - but the realisation that she saw all the signs of abuse in the relationship of her friend but couldn't change the outcome, troubles her.
As the plot progresses one realises that this is less a crime novel than one intent on shining a spotlight on a single issue, the stories clearly influenced by the headlines.
"I'm not that kind of writer, really," Oswald said in a recent interview, "but I just found myself so churned up about yet another case of a woman, and often children, murdered by an ex-partner."
The result is an odd mix of shrill social realism and feminist revenge thriller.
Oswald alternates perspectives between Paula and her longtime friend Anita, a feisty and effusive journalist, who is covering another murder case involving a slick playboy who is alleged to have pushed his girlfriend over a bridge because she threatened to leave him - his version of events is that she jumped and he was trying to save her. Guess who the jury believe.
Soon Anita's writing a long feature about "how the system failed to protect women and children killed by men" while also pursuing a relationship with a detective on the case.
Anita's a character who's easy to warm to and becomes the book's moral centre; but Oswald's biggest challenge is to turn her rather austere GP into an avenging vigilante and make readers believe it.
When a woman walks into her office displaying tell-tale signs of abuse Paula eschews the usual doctor/patient protocols and begins to go down a different path.
"You don't get it," the woman tells her, "I tried leaving him … I did all that stuff they reckon you should do … He tracked me down every time."
When her husband walks into the surgery a few days later with a cut hand he has no idea who he's up against.
- Reviewed by Greg Fleming
The Family Doctor, by Debra Oswald (Allen & Unwin, $37)
