In the spring of 2020, Dr. Marcus Kessler is one of the best emergency physicians at Ravenswood Presbyterian Hospital - and one of the most quietly desperate men in New York City. As COVID-19 fills his hospital's hallways with the dying and its morgue with the unclaimed, Kessler discovers a horrifying opportunity in the chaos: bodies that will never be missed, families that will never ask questions, and a black-market meat wholesaler willing to pay for whatever he can deliver.
What begins as a single, cold transaction becomes a two-year operation. Kessler harvests organs from the dead before they're cremated. He pulls gold fillings from the elderly. He sterilizes what's left under ultraviolet light and sells it - as cheap ground beef - into the fast-food supply chain, certain that a city drowning in its own catastrophe will never look closely enough to notice what he's really doing.
It takes a new nurse to notice what a pandemic-shattered system couldn't. When Sarah Delgado's patient is wheeled into quarantine with a COVID diagnosis that doesn't match his symptoms, she has no idea she's about to uncover the worst thing to ever happen inside Ravenswood's walls - or that she'll arrive just in time to stop it happening again. Doctor Death is a novel about what a good hospital, a broken system, and one man's greed can hide from the world when nobody is looking - and about the people who refuse to stop looking anyway.
In the spring of 2020, Dr. Marcus Kessler is one of the best emergency physicians at Ravenswood Presbyterian Hospital - and one of the most quietly desperate men in New York City. As COVID-19 fills his hospital's hallways with the dying and its morgue with the unclaimed, Kessler discovers a horrifying opportunity in the chaos: bodies that will never be missed, families that will never ask questions, and a black-market meat wholesaler willing to pay for whatever he can deliver.
What begins as a single, cold transaction becomes a two-year operation. Kessler harvests organs from the dead before they're cremated. He pulls gold fillings from the elderly. He sterilizes what's left under ultraviolet light and sells it - as cheap ground beef - into the fast-food supply chain, certain that a city drowning in its own catastrophe will never look closely enough to notice what he's really doing.
It takes a new nurse to notice what a pandemic-shattered system couldn't. When Sarah Delgado's patient is wheeled into quarantine with a COVID diagnosis that doesn't match his symptoms, she has no idea she's about to uncover the worst thing to ever happen inside Ravenswood's walls - or that she'll arrive just in time to stop it happening again. Doctor Death is a novel about what a good hospital, a broken system, and one man's greed can hide from the world when nobody is looking - and about the people who refuse to stop looking anyway.
