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 city, 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.

Jerry Leake is the author of ten books of fiction and nine books on rhythm and percussion. His fiction ranges across thrillers, dark fantasy, and literary suspense - the Jack's Alive trilogy, the Twin Crossing duology, Lethal Injection, The Soul Searcher, Sand and Ceremony - and often draws on the places and people he knows firsthand. He has also written cartoon and comic collections - Far Fetched, Dogbreath - and books for younger readers. He is a Professor of World Percussion at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory, where he has taught for more than thirty years. His percussion texts on North Indian, South Indian, West African, and Afro-Cuban rhythm are used by students and players worldwide. He has studied and performed in Ghana and India, and is a founding member of Natraj and Club d'Elf, leads the world-rock fusion octet Cubist, and has long played with the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society.