There are cliffhangers aplenty. It’s as if A. Scott Pearson, M.D., is daring you not to start the next chapter:
• …Meg peeled out, the Civic fishtailing away from the rapid fire of three more
shots.
• “Better take your waders. Hear the water moccasins are nasty this time of year.”
• “There’s something very strange about [this] autopsy.”
• His hand shook as he opened the door.
• The cart descended into darkness.
• [H]e heard gunfire through the receiver followed by a metallic thud, and the
line went dead.
Pearson, associate professor of Surgery, has just published his first novel, “Rupture,” a thriller set at a teaching hospital in Memphis. He is a graduate of the
University of Tennessee School of Medicine at Memphis, and has been a faculty
member at Vanderbilt for 10 years, and his fictitious Mid-South Medical Center
and Gates Memorial Hospital blend elements of each.
Pearson’s clinical practice in general surgery and surgical oncology is at the Nashville
V.A. Hospital and he has does research in a lab in Medical Center North. An old
building that will seem suspiciously familiar to those with offices in Medical
Center North is the site of a murder in “Rupture.”
“Rupture” (on its literal level, the title refers to the unfortunate—and criminal— simultaneous failures of implanted medical devices) is a plot-driven page
turner that creates a sympathetic main character and then rapidly gets him in
deep, deep trouble.
That character is Dr. Eli Branch, a young, ambitious surgeon who becomes
involved (in a good way) with an attractive pathologist named Meg, and involved
(in a very bad way) with a conspiracy of corrupt business executives and evil
physicians, as well as evil business executives and corrupt physicians.
