Forced by the diabolical Senor Tenoch to use her skills as a heart surgeon to harvest human hearts for sale on the black market, Dr. Cassy Baldwin must find a way to free herself and her young son from the clutches of Tenoch
Would you buy a human heart for transplantation?Imagine that you were in the ER of a metropolitan hospital and the EEG of an accident victim is flat-lined with no electrical activity indicating brain death. The surviving family members have given their consent to organ donation from their loved one. The harvesting of the organs for transplantation may begin.
This death-defying scene is repeated in hundreds of operating rooms each day. But not for everyone is a transplant organ available when needed. Three thousand people in the United States die each year waiting for an organ transplant; nearly 50,000 more sit and wait, hoping for a donor before it's too late.
In THE BROKER, a medical suspense thriller, a "Lazarus" patient revives in a Dallas ER and threatens to destroy the professional reputation of heart surgeon/Cassy Baldwin. She begins digging for answers to the mystery of her patient's much-publicized mistaken diagnosis of death. What she unearths propels her across international borders and through brutal ancient Aztec rituals, into a world where the human body is nothing but a collection of parts for sale to the highest bidder.
The plot descends into vivid nightmare and chilling intrigue as a horrific plan to harvest and sell organs unfolds around Cassy and her son. She finds herself in mortal danger wherever she turns, from sterile operating rooms to dusty Aztec ruins to staggering opulence on both sides of hte Mexico-United States border where money can buy anything, including a human heart.
Denton A. Cooley,M.D., Texas Heart Institute President and Surgeon-in-Chief, said, "What makes THE BROKER so compelling is the plausibility of its premise. The sale, and sometimes theft, of organs is already a reality in certain parts of the world. That fact could so closely mirror fiction testifies to the desperate shortage of donor organs that exists today."
The fictional portrayal of the ethical issues in THE BROKER highlights the problem of desperate transplant organ shortages better than any scientific paper that I could imagine. THE BROKER is a novel of the 90s---focusing on the unique social, medical, ethical, and economic issues surrounding transplantation and is illustrated by the tangled nightmare that Cassy's life becomes.
The possibility of an organ black market was inconceivable a generation ago, because there was no demand for donor organs. Medical technology had not advanced enough to allow widespread transplants of different organs. Today the story is different. Because of the pent-up demand for organs for transplantation, nearly ten people die each day in this country for want of a donor organ.
And the only foreseeable solution to this shortage is for all of us to consider organ donation and to make our decision known to our family. We should all consider organ donation . . it is the ultimate gift . . the gift of life.
