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 an Associate Professor of Percussion at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. He leads the world-rock-fusion octet Cubist that performs compositions from his acclaimed 2010 debut CD. Jerry recently released his third Cubist CD, Prominence, where African songs and melodies are woven into contemporary designs. He is a founding member of the world-music ensemble Natraj and performs with Club d'Elf and the Agbekor Society. Jerry has written eight widely used texts on North and South Indian, West African, Latin American percussion, and rhythm theory. He is former president of the Massachusetts PAS Chapter, and was a presenter of his "Harmonic Time" method at a 2011 TEDx Seminar in Cambridge, MA. He has also written over 30 articles for PAS magazine. Sand and Ceremony is his debut novel.