Chain of Custody: A Novel

My name is Dr. Michael Malone. I used to be Assistant Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine and Interventional Cardiology at Mt. Zion Hospital and an honorary police surgeon as well (I have kept the cardboard parking permit on my dashboard to ward off parking tickets). Now I practice law rather than medicine. A change of heart, a change of venue, is the way I view it, though some former medical colleagues still act, all these years later, as if a cult is holding me against my will and I'm the one who needs an intervention.

Meet Dr. Michael Malone. Doctor. Lawyer. Suspect.
        
When his estranged wife, a highly respected deputy district attorney in charge of the sex crimes unit, is found murdered in their apartment, Malone falls, inevitably, under the suspicious eye of the police. After all, he's on the verge of a nasty divorce. He may lose custody of their teenaged son. His unusual medical-legal background gives him the kind of inside knowledge--how to disguise the victim's time of death or prevent evidence from being deemed admissible in court--that can keep a guilty man out of jail. At least until the DNA tests reveal that blood at the crime scene can only be Malone's.
          
Did Malone do it? Or is he being railroaded by the D.A. and the police--a payback for the wrongful--death action he's pursuing for the family of a prisoner who died in police custody? And if the police have already made up their minds, who's going to find the real killer? And how? And how soon?
          
Harry Levy combines the best elements of taut courtroom drama with the cutting--edge forensics of a medical thriller.  Narrated by a wise--cracking but surprisingly vulnerable New Yorker, Chain of Custody gives an unforgettable fresh twist to a classic tale: a man accused of killing his wife and a race against the clock for justice.

Harry Levy, M.D., studied at Columbia, New York University, and Yale. He was the  director of the widely acclaimed feature documentary Interned, which recorded his year as an intern. He went on to become a preventive--medicine specialist and is currently the executive editor of Cyberounds®, a website for health professionals.