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Bestselling;"master of the medical thriller" ( Dr. Jack Stapleton As Jack finds himself venturing deeper into Gerald’s shady business practices, he finds himself at odds with his wife, Dr. Laurie Montgomery Stapleton, the Chief Medical Examiner of the city--a position susceptible to Gerald’s hefty mayoral political donations. Still Jack persists, and when a lead nurse at the MGH who had been assisting his investigation is found dead, reportedly by suicide, Jack’s suspicions are only deepened as the autopsy he does raises the issue that the suicide was perhaps a homicide. But with the truth threatening to surface and Gerald willing to do anything to keep his empire intact, it is clear that Jack is a major threat. From Jack’s perspective, exposing what’s going on behind the scenes could save the institution and countless lives… or it could cost Jack his own.
About the author
Robin Cook, M.D., is the author of more than forty books and is credited with creating the medical-thriller genre with his groundbreaking and wildly successful 1977 novel, Coma. His most recent bestsellers include Manner of Death, Night Shift, Viral, Genesis, Pandemic, and Charlatans. Cook divides his time between Florida, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
Summary
From the "master of the medical thriller" (The New York Times) Robin Cook, fan favorites Jack and Laurie return in a gripping new novel of greed, corruption, and the lethal cost of private equity in healthcare
Dr. Jack Stapleton thought he’d left behind the ruthless world of corporate healthcare by retraining in forensic pathology. But when he agrees to help a former colleague being sued for malpractice over a sepsis death following a routine cataract surgery, Jack is pulled back into the throes of modern clinical medicine.
The autopsy file creates more questions than answers, especially after Jack learns that the hospital where the operation had been performed was purchased a year earlier by an aggressive private equity firm—and its founder, Gerald Barlow, had been involved in the company that ruined Jack’s medical practice years ago.
As Jack ventures deeper into the mystery, he shockingly discovers there’d been forty-six other recent infectious deaths at the same hospital—and Barlow had pressing reasons to keep them out of the media. Pursuing the trail into the shadows of a system corrupted by profit and secrecy, Jack doesn’t realize how close he is to danger—until hospital staff start turning up dead. In a world where medicine meets money, he must fight not only to expose a fatal conspiracy, but to survive it himself.
