Boston's Bayside Hospital is a long way from Dr. Abby DiMatteo's humble roots, and she's elated when their elite cardiac transplant team taps her as a potential recruit. But an anguished, life-and-death decision soon jeopardizes her entire career. She and chief resident Vivian Chao boldly direct a crash victim's harvested heart to a dying seventeen-year-old boy-instead of the wealthy forty-six-year-old woman to whom the hospital had cross-matched it. The repercussions cost Dr. Chao her job, and leave Abby shaken.

Then a new heart suddenly appears, the woman's transplant is completed, and Abby makes a terrible discovery. The donor records have been falsified-the new heart has not come through the proper channels. Defying Bayside Hospital's demands for silence, Abby and Vivian plunge into an investigation that reveals a lethal unthinkable conspiracy. Every move Abby makes spawns a vicious backlash…and on a ship anchored in the waters of Boston Harbor, a final, grisly discovery lies waiting.

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D.

While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, "Adrift", which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Tess's first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her suspense novels since then have been: Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999), The Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner (2003), Body Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club (2006), and The Bone Garden (2007). Her books have been translated into 31 languages, and more than 15 million copies have been sold around the world.

As well as being a New York Times bestselling author, she has also been a #1 bestseller in both Germany and the UK. She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) and the Rita Award (for The Surgeon.) Critics around the world have praised her novels as "Pulse-pounding fun" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "Scary and brilliant" (Toronto Globe and Mail), and "Polished, riveting prose" (Chicago Tribune). Publisher Weekly has dubbed her the "medical suspense queen".

Now retired from medicine, she writes full time. She lives in Maine.