"Harvest" Reviews

BOOKLIST
Rarely does a woman look up from an operating table to see her fiancè wielding a scalpel to harvest her liver for a transplant. Abby DiMatteo, second-year surgical resident at Boston's Bayside Hospital, has precisely that experience. The trouble starts when DiMatteo and her senior resident sidetrack a heart scheduled for the wife of a wealthy businessman and have it placed in a teenager. The businessman then launches a cruelly effective personal and professional campaign against DiMatteo. Meanwhile, the Russian mafia is carrying on an extremely profitable black market in human organs harvested from orphans who believe they are bound for adoption in the U.S. Detective Slug Katzka slowly comes around to DiMatteo's side and ultimately saves her from her lover's scalpel. Retired internist Gerritsen's first novel is a well-paced and smoothly written story that demonstrates she knows people as well as medicine.

-- William Beatty

KIRKUS REVIEWS
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, Abby 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. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild selection; Mystery Guild selection)

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