I didn’t even have time to read on my lunch hour yesterday. Since I read an entire book on Sunday for yesterday’s review, I haven’t had time to finish another one. Fortunately, Sandie Herron read an older title, something a little different that she’s willing to share. Here’s Heart Seizure by Bill Fitzhugh.
HEART SEIZURE
By Bill Fitzhugh
William Morrow (March 4, 2003)
What would you do if your aging mom needed a heart transplant and she was second on the list of patients to receive the next heart? That meant two people would need to die before she could get her heart. For Spencer Tailor, the news comes that a heart with his mother Rose’s rare blood type will be available shortly, as soon as the previous owner is done using it.
Down the hall, a grieving mother gives permission to donate her son Mardell Coleman’s organs. They can’t be harvested until Mardell is brain dead, which he’s not, yet. He’s in a permanent vegetative state. So they wait.
President Webster had open-heart surgery several months ago to repair a leaky value. He wants to impress upon the nation during his re-election campaign that he is fit as a fiddle, so he goes jogging … and collapses. He needs a heart transplant. His chief of staff used to be the unofficial 11th assistant director at the FBI, one with the funds and the means to get things done outside certain channels. An FBI agent arrives at the same hospital as Spencer Tailor’s mom and the dying Mardell Coleman and demands possession of the heart. He convinces the organ procurement team to inject experimental drugs into Mardell to stop brain activity. Being held at gunpoint convinces the surgeons to listen, and once they know the heart is bound for the President, they forget protocol and begin harvesting for him.
Senator Peggy Check has become her party’s first choice to run against President Webster. She’ll do anything to stop Webster from recovering. She’s managed to find her way onto certain Senate subcommittees and ends up with a two-man special ops team. Their mission is to stop the delivery of the donor heart bound for the President.
Spence Tailor has no intentions of letting this donor heart go to anybody but his mom, so he snags it from the doctor rushing it to the helicopter on the roof.
And that is just the beginning of this wild and crazy romp through California and politics and medicine and special forces. Familial love, bureaucracy, ambition, and brute force butt heads. Only Bill Fitzhugh could take on these enormous institutions and run them around each other til they’re dizzy. And he really knows his stuff. Details about weapons, drugs, and heart transplantation are not part of everyday dialogue, but they are in this book. Special ops from the FBI and the subcommittees baffle the mind. The acronyms alone are enough to populate a can of alphabet soup. I think the names may have been changed to protect the guilty, but the machinations of the people have not.
Fitzhugh is also the author of PEST CONTROL, THE ORGAN GRINDERS, CROSS DRESSING, and FENDER BENDERS. These are not in series, so there are no worries about picking them up in order. However, I caution you to not overdose on more than one at a time, they are that hilarious.
I’ve run out of adjectives to call this book – zany, madcap, wacky, off-the-wall, over-the-top, frenzied, hilarious, absurd, impossible, implausible — but I believe it could really happen if the circumstances were right. However, it would probably be “more complicated than that.”
Sounds great, Sandie! I’ve been a fan of Fitzhugh’s since PEST CONTROL, his first book about exterminator Bob Dillon, who is mistaken for a hit man. THE EXTERMINATORS is the sequel. There are also two books about FM DJ turned PI Rick Shannon, RADIO ACTIVITY and HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED, and Amazon says that HEART SEIZURE is the first in the “Transplant Tetrology” with HUMAN RESOURCES, THE ORGAN GRINDERS and A PERFECT HARVEST.
You’re right Jeff. Since I wrote this, Bill Fitzhugh has written more hilarity. A Perfect Harvest is book 4 and is due out August 12. I’ve enjoyed many of Bill’s books. Have you read Fender Benders? My husband, Bill, won an auction to have his name used, and he got quite a large part as “Big Bill Herron”. Not a medical book but a funny one involving the music industry.
Very interesting, I think I would enjoy the book. I am like to read all things medical. I have a friend who needs a lung transplant, but he has been denied three times.
This morning I had to review a protein shake. Nothing unusual except they used beet juice for the color that still came out a pale pink, and it did not have very much strawberry flavor. But what caught my eye is the location of the company. It is on the same highway as the nearest landfill to us! Apparently you cannot live in a house that is three miles or less from a landfill because of toxic fumes. I don’t know the rules for a company. I tried and tried to find out how many miles the company was from the landfill. Finally, I tried a trip distance thing on Bing and it was 4.7 miles between the landfill and the company. That is close but I guess it is OK? I wrote up the review and am waiting to see if it gets rejected.
I’m sad to hear your friend has been denied. If you’re in for a bit of dark humor, you’d probably enjoy this. There is certainly a medical aspect, but it’s more about the chase for the heart. Sounds strange just typing that! And isn’t beet juice supposed to be very healthy?