The Body Traders

The media turned him into a medical God; it will take only one reporter to turn heaven into hell. It has been called undeniably miraculous; it has been called intoxicatingly awe-inspiring. Just as often, it has been called ethically treacherous. Right or wrong, organ transplantation has been one of the most high-profile medical technologies over the last half a century engendering both reverence and revulsion. But the people who make these miracles happen are rarely the gods and goddesses they may appear to be. Set against the backdrop of this search for immortality by developing patch-work people, The Body Traders is the story of a young newspaper reporter, Eve Cochrane, who is assigned to write a series of public relations pieces about the local university medical center's transplant program. Facing a crossroads in her own career as a journalist, Eve finds that her nice little feature story might be more interesting than she had first thought. Dr. Daniel Curtis is the charismatic head of the transplant program who has his own reasons for wanting the program to flourish His evangelical approach to his chosen work was significantly inspired by his own father's successful career as a television evangelist. Daniel Curtis, however, has control over life and death on this earth; this increasingly intoxicating feeling of power is the driving force behind both his work and his relationships. Complicating this "power versus right" struggle is Eve and Daniel's relationship as former lovers. Eve's investigation introduces her to a series of people whose lives have been touched in some way by the transplant program: the transplant coordinator who really wanted to be a doctor and will do anything for Daniel Curtis; a young liver transplant recipient who refuses another transplant; the kidney recipient who sets out to find the identity of her organ donor and discovers files on donors are missing from medical records. In the course of her investigation she discovers that the work of the International Body Replacement Society might provide answers to her questions. Eve is aided in her work by Dr. Paul Fairfax, a brilliant children's heart transplant surgeon who also seems to desire to see right done. But Eve doesn't quite know the whole story. Yet. When Eve discovers a tie between The International Body Replacement Society and a large, international pharmaceutical company, things begin to unravel.