Lethal Injection

Some hospitals bury their mistakes. This one is being paid to.

April 1998. Diane Saunders arrives at Boston County General as a third-year surgical resident and is in an operating room before she's found the restroom. She's good, she's fast, and she has nine hundred miles between her and the only family she has left—a younger sister in a Chicago psychiatric ward whose insurance runs out at the end of the year.

Then, a long-term coma patient dies on Ward C, ninety minutes after an injection Diane watched a first-year nurse administer correctly. The toxicology comes back naming a drug that was never in the room. The nurse is dismissed within a week. The bottle disappears into the pharmacy and is reconciled and destroyed.

Diane starts pulling at it—a lawyer's name that turns up on seven settlements, a margin note in a calendar, a locked drawer—and finds that every thread runs back to the same man: the head of surgery, the finest spinal surgeon in the vicinity, who sits down with frightened patients and asks them about their gardens.

He knows she's looking. He knows about her sister. And on a dark road north of Boston, a man who is not a police officer taps on her car window and tells her he is.

Lethal Injection is a medical thriller about money and about the arithmetic that gets done on people who cannot speak for themselves.