THE CADAVER’S BALL

Atkins (The Portrait, 1998, etc.) showcases an eminent psychiatrist who, years after losing his love to a colleague, hatches a monstrous plot for revenge.

Dr. Peter Grainger has been tormented by guilt ever since he swerved his car into a stone wall, killing his wife and their unborn daughter. He’d be even more unnerved if he knew that Beth Grainger was the love of his friend Dr. Ed Tyson’s life, and that Tyson, though he solaced himself by marrying a gorgeous cardiologist and plunging into the development of miracle drugs that have vaulted him to the deanship of Peter’s Greenwich Village medical school, has been inconsolable ever since. Now the time is ripe for Tyson’s revenge. First he manipulates Peter into taking on the case of Ann Walsh, a suicidal medical student with a propensity for sleeping with her therapists and a raging, vindictive father. Then he slips Peter a dose of the sinister designer drug T2745 and plots a murder with Peter as the patsy. When Det. Nicole Sullivan, struggling with her own traumatic memories, falls for Peter instead of reading him his rights, Tyson strikes again. How can Peter outwit an enemy who combines the skills of a shaman, a mimic, a hacker and wiretapper, and a world-class headshrinker?

Intense and immensely entertaining for those who don’t mind going over the top in the company of a villain whose tactics include everything but shape-shifting.