Текст книги "Brain Dead"
Автор книги: Eileen Dreyer
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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
Excerpt from
Bad Medicine
A Suspense Novel
by
Eileen Dreyer
New York Times bestselling Author
BAD MEDICINE
Awards & Accolades
4 ½ Stars, Gold Medal, Romantic Times Magazine
"With her own unique blend of dark humor, complex motivations and riveting suspense, Eileen Dreyer is a very tough act to beat. Molly Burke is an extraordinary character whose life experiences have made her a woman performing a delicate balancing act with mental and emotional stability. A nerve-shattering suspense."
~RT Magazine
Nobody noticed that there was something wrong with the mayor's press conference. It was a small thing, and the press was preoccupied with the breaking airline strike story at the airport, not to mention the ongoing investigation into morals charges against the Speaker of the House, on which most of them had sizeable bets. So they all slumped in the stifling room in the city hall waiting for Mayor Martell Williamson to announce who was finally going to be given the contract to open the casino on the St. Louis riverfront, and not one of them noticed who was missing.
The citizens of the St. Louis metropolitan area didn't notice, even though they were being dished up the news live with lunch. Most St. Louisans found politics tiresome—especially city politics. It wasn't even as if it was that important an announcement. During the two years the Board of Aldermen had carried on their public and often bitter debate over the contract, some thirty riverboats had already set up business on the nearby Missouri and Meramec rivers, which were much preferable places to park and wander than north St. Louis anyway.
Besides, it was hot out, and the people of St. Louis were far more interested in their weather than their politics. If they were even home to watch the news, instead of lurking half-submerged in one of the neighborhood pools to escape the humidity or at the stadium watching the Cardinals warm up against the Phillies, they were busy refilling their iced tea during the press conference so they wouldn't miss Wally the Weatherman telling them just when they could expect a break from the two solid weeks of hundred degree weather.
Harry McGivers and Peg Ryan would have noticed.
Unfortunately they were already seated at the Missouri Athletic Club Grille about a mile away, celebrating the news with their favorite scotch and pharmaceutical chaser as they waited for the star of the story to return from the press conference and fill them in.
That was the problem. The star of the story wasn't there. Up on Hodiamont Street where she lived with her mother, Pearl Johnson had the television turned to the news conference as she drifted off to sleep. Pearl was dressed in her best nightgown and robe, buttoned neatly to her chin, her hair brushed out, and her lipstick on. Her door was locked, and her Bible was at her side. Her pill bottles were lined up along her nightstand, and they were empty, each and every one of them.
Pearl knew what was wrong with the press conference. She was listening to her betrayal. But she wasn't really paying attention. She was too busy dying.
Bad Medicine
by
Eileen Dreyer
~
To purchase
Bad Medicine
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Eileen Dreyer's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/EileenDreyer
~
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Page forward and continue your journey with an excerpt from
Nothing Personal
A Suspense Novel
Excerpt from
Nothing Personal
A Suspense Novel
by
Eileen Dreyer
New York Times bestselling Author
NOTHING PERSONAL
Reviews & Accolades
"A Master of the Suspense genre."
~Rave Reviews
"Dreyer levels a roguish humor at the medical establishment."
~Publishers Weekly
1994
On February 20, Kate Manion had the chance to see her hospital from the other side. It was an opportunity she hoped never to have again.
Kate was a critical-care nurse, one of those purposeful, talented people always dressed in scrubs and lab coat, a stethoscope slung around her neck and pockets filled with penlights, scissors, and trauma-scale charts, who walked through an emergency department with the purpose of MacArthur stepping out of the water at Leyte. Which Kate did. At least until she ended up on her head in a ditch alongside Highway 44 with an ambulance and a candy-apple-red Firebird wrapped around her.
If it had been her Mustang, somebody might have blamed Kate. After all, she did drive it fast—often a little too fast. But that was what Mustangs were for. Besides, Kate was a good driver. She knew all the quirks and eccentricities of her car better than her ex-husband had known hers. Kate would never have let her car land in a ditch.
But Kate wasn't driving either vehicle. The guy driving the Firebird would have been arrested on the spot for driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter, if he'd lived long enough for the cops to get handcuffs on him. By the time that determination was made, though, Kate was already on her way to the medical center in critical condition with chest and head injuries.
Within an hour, Kate was in surgery to repair the small laceration she'd suffered to her aorta and the clots she'd collected on her brain from the depressed skull fracture. She had tubes stuck into her chest to re-expand her collapsed lungs, a tube in her trachea to help her breathe, one in her stomach to drain away any digestive juices that could compromise her breathing ability, and another in her bladder to make sure her urine was clear and neatly collected. She had three large-bore IVs in her, one in each arm and one in her subclavian vein, to replace fluids and electrolytes; an arterial line; an intracranial pressure sensor to measure the potential threat to her brain; a Swan Ganz pump to measure her blood volume and cardiac output, and a blood pump to reinfuse her with the red cells she was losing through those chest tubes. And with all that in, she still managed to make hospital history. On February 24, Kate Manion became the only intensive-care patient in medical center memory to successfully kill her nurse.
Nothing Personal
by
Eileen Dreyer
~
To purchase
Nothing Personal
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Eileen Dreyer's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/EileenDreyer
~
Discover more with
eBookDiscovery.com
Page forward and complete your journey
with an excerpt from
A Man to Die For
A Suspense Novel
Excerpt from
A Man to Die For
A Suspense Novel
by
Eileen Dreyer
New York Times bestselling Author
A MAN TO DIE FOR
Awards & Accolades
RITA Winner – Romance Writers of America
Nominated, Anthony Award in mystery
REVIEWS
"A wicked prescription guaranteed to give you sleepless nights." ~Nora Roberts
"Eileen Dreyer creates the sort of skin-crawling suspense that will leave readers looking with a wild and wary eye upon anyone at the other end of a stethoscope."
~Elizabeth George
Control your impulses, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church agreed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.
"Honey, why are we here?"
"I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom."
A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn't exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.
Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she'd never visited this place before. She'd never even known precisely where it was.
A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased the traditional globe lamps that flanked it. Unmarked police cars and crime scene vans hugged the curb. Police in uniform or windbreakers and walkie-talkies hovered near the front door, chatting among themselves. Civilians edged by, sensing their own intrusion, much the way they would enter her hospital.
Casey didn't want to be here. If she could have, she would have approached her friends on the county police force instead. She would have pulled one of them aside when they'd come into her emergency room and proposed her theory in a way that could be considered an inside joke instead of an accusation.
"Say, Bert, what would you think if I said there's something just a little more sinister than fee-splitting going on around here? What if I told you that some of the bad luck around this place is actually connected? And not just because I know all the people involved, either."
Bert would laugh and deflect her fears with common sense, and the issue would have gone no further.
Only none of the crimes Casey suspected had actually happened in the county. Bert wouldn't know anything about them. He couldn't do her any good. If she wanted any relief from the suspicions that had been building over the last few weeks like a bad case of indigestion, she was going to have to find it with the city cops. Cops she didn't know. Cops who didn't know her.
Casey pulled on the heavy glass-and-brass door and winced at its screech of protest. It sounded as if it resented her intrusion. The way everybody else ignored the noise, the door must have been objecting for years.
Inside, the foyer was a high square of marble, cool and hushed. Casey held the heavy door open for her mother to follow inside. Sketching a quick sign of the cross, the little woman instinctively reached for a holy water font.
"It's not a church," Casey reminded her.
It was hell. She was in hell for what she suspected.
A Man to Die For
by
Eileen Dreyer
~
To purchase
A Man to Die For
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Eileen Dreyer's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/EileenDreyer
~
Discover more with
eBookDiscovery.com
Award-winning author Eileen Dreyer has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, nominated for the Anthony Award (for suspense) and is a retired trauma nurse. Also trained in forensic nursing and death investigation, Eileen doesn't see herself actively working in the field, unless this writing thing doesn't pan out.
An addicted traveler, Eileen has sung in the best Irish pubs in the world, and admits that research is the best way to salve her insatiable curiosity. Film producers, police detectives and Olympic athletes are some of her best sources and friends.
When Eileen isn't writing suspense, she's writing historical romance. Having completed the Drake's Rakes series, which follows a group of British aristocrats willing to sacrifice everything to keep their country safe, she's moved on to Last Chance Academy where the female graduates are crossing swords with Drake's Rakes.
Eileen resides in her native St. Louis with her husband, children, and large and noisy Irish family, of which she is the reluctant matriarch. Animals are also a big part of her life, but she refuses to subject them to the limelight.
