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Dr. Abby DiMatteo receives an offer most medical residents can only dream about: to join the prestigious transplant team at Bayside Hospital in Boston.
The close-knit team demands her total loyalty. That loyalty faces the first test when Abby learns that a transplant heart meant for an impoverished boy named Joey will instead go to the wealthy wife of industrialist Victor Voss.
Unable to accept that substitution, she conspires with surgeon Vivian Chao to assure that Joey receives the heart. This violation of the transplant team's unity forces Vivian to resign from Bayside. Abby faces consequences as well, including a siege of malpractice suits by former patients.
But the questions raised when Victor's wife, Nina, receives her own heart transplant from a mysterious source compel Abby to pursue the truth about years of questionable transplants.
Gerritsen writes with compelling authenticity about heart transplants -- the months, sometimes years, of agonizing waiting for a matching organ; the grinding weariness of hours of surgery; the brute gush of blood as the chest cavity is penetrated and the diseased heart removed; the rising tension as tiny threads link the new heart into the patient's body.
The sense of looking over the surgeon's shoulder is heightened by Gerritsen, herself a former internist, whose straightforward, clipped description of the surgical process combines with an intimate's expertise of the inner workings of Bayside Hospital.
That same compelling authenticity follows Abby as her own life is threatened. It's all there: the palpable weariness of hours on call, the second-guessing of her medical and personal decisions, the dawning horror as she begins to unravel the truth about Bayside's transplants.
Gerritsen enlivens the traditional thriller theme of an innocent led astray by an older, corrupt group with deft linkage between the suspense of the surgeries themselves and the rising dangers Abby faces as she refuses to quit her efforts to learn the truth about the transplant team.
In the process, she accomplishes for the medical thriller what John Grisham achieved in his own breakout novel, The Firm: gut-grabbing tension that doesn't quit.
Sandy Huesby is a writer living in Fargo, North Dakota, and Nevis. She is online at SHuesby@aol.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.