HARVEST

Former internist Gerritsen debuts with a tale of medical suspense as taut and well-plotted as it is formulaic. Abby DiMatteo is a talented surgical resident at Boston's Bayside Hospital, with a thoracic-surgeon boyfriend on the transplant team and a shot at a coveted fellowship. But her future is threatened when she joins forces with the idealistic Chief Resident to make sure that a heart available for transplant goes to a deserving teen rather than to the wife of billionaire industrialist Victor Voss. Then, miraculously, Nina Voss gets a heart, too. When Nina develops a fever, Ahby looks for the donor records and finds them missing. She calls the hospital where the harvest allegedly was done and is told the operation never took place, but the close-knit Bayside transplant team doesn't take her concerns seriously. Meanwhile, one surgeon commits suicide, and Abby discovers that two others have died suspiciously in the last six years. Could there be an illegal organ-procurement ring at the prestigious hospital? As Abby's suspicions rise, mysterious events cause her to lose her credibility: Accused of a mercy-killing, she is relieved of her duties. Abby and a sympathetic detective follow a string of clues and end up at a freighter docked in Boston Harbor, where they're shot at by Russian mobsters. They escape, but Abby is later abducted and taken back to the freighter. It turns out to be a prison where a number of youths—kidnapped from the former Soviet Union—are held until their organs are harvested as part of a large, vicious conspiracy. Help arrives eventually, but not until Abby herself is strapped to the operating table. Canny readers will guess what's up early on, but most won't care a bit. The pages turn themselves as this far-from-superhuman heroine tries, in vain, to convince the world that she's not paranoid: Everyone really is out to get her.