Robin Cook's Coma, in which hospital patients are incubated for their vital organs, sounded like science fiction in 1977, but today such tales are commonplace. Typical is Tess Gerritsen's Harvest (1997), which features a thriving international black market in human hearts, livers, and kidneys. In Michael Palmer's ninth medical suspense novel, The Patient (2000), someone is killing off the world's most gifted neurosurgeons, while in Leonard S. Goldberg's Deadly Practice (1994) a serial killer with a grudge against doctors at a Los Angeles hospital imitates the medical specialty of each of his victims as he kills down hospital halls. Greg Bear's scientific thriller Darwin Radio (1999) features an unexplained series of stillbirths, and in Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston's Mount Dragon (1997) the mystery grows out of a biochemical company involved in secret genetic engineering.

None of these, however, combines the medical horror story with a credible female vulnerability story. Social injustice...