Miracle Cure

The master of medical suspense takes you to prestigious Boston Heart Institute, where some patients are dying to get well….

After a troubled past, Dr.  Brian Holbrook has been given a second chance to prove himself.  At state-of-the-art Boston Heart Institute, he’s been chosen to join the medical team testing a new miracle drug.  The initial results are so promising that Brian pushes to get his father–who suffers from a dangerous heart condition–accepted into the study.

But Brian is beginning to suspect his superiors are hiding something.  Why are crucial records disappearing? Why did a patient making startling progress suddenly die? Is the miracle drug a prescription for death? The answers could cost Brian more than his career.  For at Boston Heart Institute, knowing too much is the quickest way to the morgue.

Author Notes

Miracle Cure was inspired by several highly publicized cases of cheating in academic research, one of them in the lab of a Nobel Prize winner here in Boston.

This is perhaps the most autobiographical of all of my books, although there are certainly large chunks of my life in every one of them. Brian Holbrook’s life parallels my own in that I tore up a knee playing football (in my case touch football in med school against the law school) and required surgery (a total of 5 operations so far.) With time, I became addicted to the pain medicine, just as Brian did, and ultimately got into serious trouble. Gratefully, 23 years ago, concerned doctors came to my aid. Since then, I have devoted my life to helping docs with problems similar to mine, initially as a volunteer, and now as an associate director of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Physician Health Services. Brian’s trials and tribulations were modeled after those faced by many of “my” doctors. Characters in The Sisterhood, Extreme Measures (he was framed) andSilent Treatment also had to deal with alcohol and drug problems. Write about what you know about, I am always telling would-be novelists. Another aspect of Miracle Cure that hits close to my life is Brian’s father’s cardiac disease. While I was writing the novel, I was also helping to care for my father who had terminal cardiac disease and prostate cancer, which took his life a few months before the first draft of the book was finished. Many of our interactions and exchanges found their way onto the pages.

In preparation for the writing of this book, I spent many hours observing in the cardiac catheterization lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital where I trained. Drs. Michael Fifer and Igor Palacios were indispensable in this regard.