Birken (Embolus
) delivers a middling medical thriller with an attractive but poorly written protagonist. Dr. Morgan Connolly, chief of emergency medicine at a Florida hospital, is a successful and capable doctor, but suddenly her life is falling apart: she learns she's pregnant just as her husband leaves her; her father is mysteriously murdered; and her investigation of several unexpected deaths at the hospital paradoxically angers the hospital administrators, who call her competence into question. Exhausted, baffled and worried, Morgan realizes she has been targeted by an enemy she must identify before he destroys her. Morgan is a strangely passive heroine, seeming almost unconcerned about her father's murder and the looming specter of single motherhood. Depictions of hospital rivalries add authenticity, but fail to mask a weak plot and various inconsistencies. (Dec.)
