Brain Dead [Hardcover]

Eileen Dreyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1997

When trauma nurse Timmie Parker moves from California to her old hometown in Missouri, it seems her hope for turning her life around will finally be realized: She is miles away from her bitter ex-husband, respected and admired by her new coworkers and renewing her ties to her family. Then the bodies begin to pile up.

Elderly patients from Restcrest, a highly regarded and innovative senior citizen care facility attached to the hospital, keep dying in her ER, and Timmie wants to know why. But when she tries to search for answers, she gets caught in a tangled mystery that seems dangerously linked to her new friends and to the welfare of her own father. She finds an ally in Daniel Murphy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who offers her much-needed support. Together, they embark on an investigation that promises to send Murphy soaring to the top of his profession, but which also threatens to suck Timmie into a deadly conspiracy that could cost her not only her job and peace of mind, but also her life.

Filled with the gripping emergency room details that could only come from a true insider of the medical profession, Brain Dead is a white-knuckle thriller guaranteed to keep readers spellbound until the very last page.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Puckett, Missouri has something to hide and nurse Timmie Leary is on the case in Eileen Dreyer's Brain Dead. Back in her hometown of Puckett to care for her ailing father, Timmie takes a job with Memorial Hospital, where the bodies are piling up at an alarming rate. Patients from Restcrest, the hospital's senior-care facility, are dropping like flies, but not from old age. The deaths are unexplainable and Timmie suspects the worst. She enlists the help of semi-retired journalist Dan Murphy, and together the two uncover enough suspects and motives to fill Puckett's town hall. Is there an "angel of mercy" at work, or does Puckett have a serial killer on the loose? This superb medical thriller, packed with dark humor and gripping suspense, will leave readers anything but brain dead! --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Forensic nurse Timmie Leary came from L.A. to Memorial Hospital in Puckett, Missouri, to modernize its emergency room. She is well on her way when elderly patients start dropping dead. Two-time Pulitzer Prize^-winning journalist Dan Murphy offers to help Timmie solve these suspected murders. Since Dan has ideal credentials for such jobs--"the only thing he hated more than exerting himself was leaving a question unanswered" --he and Timmie make an efficient team. Now, nobody in Puckett wants to admit that anything bad is going on, for the hospital and Restcrest, the nursing home associated with it, account for many jobs and increase town pride. There are suspects and motives aplenty, however, and the increasing death rate among both Restcresters and related snoopers keeps this lively and human story moving. Dreyer knows small towns and human beings, especially how they both sometimes warp the truth for good reasons and occasionally get themselves too weary to go on. William Beatty

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061010952
• ISBN-13: 978-0061010958
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,188,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Award-winning, bestselling author Eileen Dreyer is actually evil twins. known as Kathleen Korbel to her Silhouette readers, she has published twenty-three books for Silhouette since 1986 and, under her own name(Eileen Dreyer), eight suspense novels and ten short stories. She came to publishing from the world of trauma nursing, which taught her some very important lessons, the most important being "don't sweat the small stuff," or, as her family puts it, "come see me when you get hit by a bus."

Eileen won her first publishing award in 1987, being named the best new Contemporary Romance Author by Romantic Times. Since then she has garnered not only a prestigious Anthony Award nomination for mystery, but five Rita Awards from the Romance Writers of America, which garnered her a place as only the fourth member in the RWA Hall of Fame.

Eileen is a voracious reader--of everything--who started writing at ten, when she ran out of Nancy Drews. She writes in two genres, because she believes in the message of both: hope and justice.(well, and because she hasn't finished that big fantasy yet)You can figure out which is which.

A frequent speaker at writer's conferences and universities all across the country, Eileen is a member not only of Romance Writers of America, but Novelists, Inc, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and, just in case things go wrong, Emergency Nurses Association. She has also assumed the mantle of unofficial mascot for the International Association of Forensic Nurses, a new forensic subspecialty that, amazingly enough, has begun to show up in her work.

A lifelong resident of St. Louis, Missouri, Eileen has been married for thirty-two years to husband Rick, and has two children. She also has animals but refuses to expose them to the glare of the limelight. An addicted traveler, she has sung in some of the best Irish pubs in the world, and enjoys the kind of hands-on book research that lets her salve an insatiable curiosity. She counts film producers, police detectives and Olympic athletes as some of her sources and friends.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book, too long, November 1, 1998

By 

Frank (Stockton CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brain Dead (Mass Market Paperback)

I agree with the other two reviews (not counting the 5-star ad which is the first "review," with such nuggets as "A reader would have to be BRAIN DEAD not to enjoy this tale").
This is a good hospital suspense book. Several times the protagonist Timmie will reach a conclusion and forget to share that with the reader. And the secondary characters do blur into each other.
The major fault I found with the book is its length -- 497 pages!! In reaching this length, the author throws in too much repetition of dialogue, reflection, and plot. The author really does not have to repeat something 10 times to have the reader get the point. This would have been a much better book at about 350 pages.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting tale, June 19, 2002

By 

Carol A. Strickland (NC, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Brain Dead (Mass Market Paperback)

The Alzheimers angle makes this book special, but the mystery seems to get side-tracked at times. The sudden realization at the end seems rather obvious to the reader, and indeed seems to have been how the book led us throughout most of the narrative. Were we suposed to have been surprised?

There are some episodes and characters whose potential fall through, leaving a sense of a hole (the ex-hubby, the car chase -- why?). Though they're there to throw us off the real track, there still needs to be more explanation for why they happened, why they were needed.

Yes, the nurse talk got too thick at times but it was fascinating all the same (I love the term "gomer"), and Timmie's often uncaring attitude towards her patients was off-putting. This might be just layering of character, but I wanted to like Timmie. She was caring but uncaring, and she knew a little too much about everything. But her situation was one that gripped me, and the relationship between her father and her was a fascinating one to explore.

Her name, though: Timothy Leary-Parker. It brought me out of the story every time it was mentioned, even just as "Timmie." Too much, too cute.

Good writing otherwise, and like I said, the Alzheimers angle put quite a fascinating spin on the whole thing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars not one of her best, September 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Brain Dead (Mass Market Paperback)

As an Eileen Dreyer fan, I was sadly disappointed with this book. The rapid, choppy, hospital slang was hard to read. Timmie was not a very sympathetic character, and the other characters were so alike I had a hard time keeping straight who was who.