Carol Cassella is a practicing physician and the national bestselling author of three novels, Gemini (2014), Healer (2010), Oxygen (2008), each published by Simon & Schuster and translated into multiple foreign languages. All three novels were Indie Next Picks. Her books have been finalists for the Washington State Book Award, and highlighted as top choices by Library Journal, Booklist, Harpers Bazaar, People Magazine, Poets & Writers, Women’s Day, and USA Today, among others. She frequently appears as a speaker and teacher at literary events and conferences throughout the United States.
An unidentified woman is hit by a car and abandoned along a rural highway in western Washington. She is life-flighted to a Seattle trauma center, where she’s admitted to the intensive care unit overseen by Dr. Charlotte Reese, who battles to keep her “Jane Doe” patient alive while a police investigation tries to discover who is responsible for this hit and run—a charge that could turn into murder if this gravely injured woman dies.
Charlotte also senses a more covert battle brewing with the hospital’s legal department when they assign a professional guardian to stand in lieu of Jane’s unknown family and make critical decisions about her care. In frustration, Charlotte and her boyfriend Eric, a science journalist, begin their own efforts to find Jane’s family, veering across the professional boundary between physician and patient. As their lives become more entangled, the truths Charlotte learns will radically alter her own life more profoundly than they alter her patients.
Claire Boehning is about to launch her medical career when she meets Addison, a biochemist with blazing genius and big dreams. But a complicated pregnancy deflects Claire’s professional path and she is forced to drop out of her residency.
A few years later, Addison invents a simple blood test to diagnose ovarian cancer, and his biotech start-up lands a fortune. Overnight the Boehnings are catapulted into a financial and social tier they had never anticipated or sought, and over time they grow unconsciously complacent with wealth and security: they move into a gracious Seattle home and buy an old ranch in the high desert mountains of eastern Washington; Claire drifts away from medicine to become a full time wife and mother.
Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived, and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has constructed her professional life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine. But when her tried and true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit.
Marie's best friend, colleague, and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations, and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she’s chosen, the bridges she’s burned and the colleagues and superiors she’s mistaken for friends.