BRAIN DEAD by Eileen Dreyer - FIRST EDITION BOOK

Forensic nurse Timmie Leary is the newest member of the emergency room staff at Memorial Medical Center in Puckett, Missouri. Timmie may look like an outsider in this backwater town, but she's actually come home again after a bad marriage and an exhausting stint at a Los Angeles hospital. Timmie quickly gains her coworkers' respect for her split-second reactions on the job. Yet even Timmie is stunned when the ex-husband of one of her fellow nurses turns up in the ER with the flu and leaves in a body bag. Timmie is far away from the perilous streets of L.A., but something just as deadly is festering nearby beneath the glossy surface of Restcrest, the hospital's highly regarded senior citizen care-and-research facility - where Timmie's father is the latest patient. Restcrest patients are suddenly piling up in the hospital morgue, and old age isn't reason enough to explain these tragedies or the rash of other mysterious deaths Timmie encounters in her new job. Adding to the dangerous mix is the attempted shooting of the hospital's golden-boy administrator, enough bureaucratic red tape to wrap a full-body cast, and the fact that Timmie's the only one in the hospital who is fighting to find out the truth. In her search for answers, Timmie joins forces with Daniel Murphy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with a bad case of burnout and a gig at a local paper. But as their investigation promises to rocket Murphy back to the big leagues, it also threatens to suck Timmie into a chilling conspiracy of corruption and murder that could destroy her friendships, her family, and any hope she has of rebuilding her life.