Bleed

By: Robin Cook

From the "master of the medical thriller" (The New York Times) Robin Cook, fan favorites Jack and Laurie return in a gripping new novel of greed, corruption, and the lethal cost of private equity in healthcare

Dr. Jack Stapleton thought he’d left behind the ruthless world of corporate healthcare by retraining in forensic pathology. But when he agrees to help a former colleague being sued for malpractice over a sepsis death following a routine cataract surgery, Jack is pulled back into the throes of modern clinical medicine.

The autopsy file creates more questions than answers, especially after Jack learns that the hospital where the operation had been performed was purchased a year earlier by an aggressive private equity firm—and its founder, Gerald Barlow, had been involved in the company that ruined Jack’s medical practice years ago.

As Jack ventures deeper into the mystery, he shockingly discovers there’d been forty-six other recent infectious deaths at the same hospital—and Barlow had pressing reasons to keep them out of the media. Pursuing the trail into the shadows of a system corrupted by profit and secrecy, Jack doesn’t realize how close he is to danger—until hospital staff start turning up dead. In a world where medicine meets money, he must fight not only to expose a fatal conspiracy, but to survive it himself.