Kate was a critical-care nurse, one of those purposeful, talented people always dressed in scrubs and lab coat, a stethoscope slung around her neck and pockets filled with penlights, scissors, and trauma-scale charts, who walked through an emergency department with the purpose of MacArthur stepping out of the water at Leyte. Which Kate did. At least until she ended up on her head in a ditch alongside Highway 44 with an ambulance and a candy-apple-red Firebird wrapped around her.

If it had been her Mustang, somebody might have blamed Kate. After all, she did drive it fast—often a little too fast. But that was what Mustangs were for. Besides, Kate was a good driver. She knew all the quirks and eccentricities of her car better than her ex-husband had known hers. Kate would never have let her car land in a ditch.

But Kate wasn't driving either vehicle. The guy driving the Firebird would have been arrested on the spot for driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter, if he'd lived long enough for the cops to get handcuffs on him. By the time that determination was made, though, Kate was already on her way to the medical center in critical condition with chest and head injuries.

Within an hour, Kate was in surgery to repair the small laceration she'd suffered to her aorta and the clots she'd collected on her brain from the depressed skull fracture. She had tubes stuck into her chest to re-expand her collapsed lungs, a tube in her trachea to help her breathe, one in her stomach to drain away any digestive juices that could compromise her breathing ability, and another in her bladder to make sure her urine was clear and neatly collected. She had three large-bore IVs in her, one in each arm and one in her subclavian vein, to replace fluids and electrolytes; an arterial line; an intracranial pressure sensor to measure the potential threat to her brain; a Swan Ganz pump to measure her blood volume and cardiac output, and a blood pump to reinfuse her with the red cells she was losing through those chest tubes. And with all that in, she still managed to make hospital history. On February 24, Kate Manion became the only intensive-care patient in medical center memory to successfully kill her nurse.

Nothing Personal

by

Eileen Dreyer

~

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Nothing Personal

from your favorite eBook Retailer,

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Page forward and complete your journey

with an excerpt from

A Man to Die For

A Suspense Novel

Excerpt from

A Man to Die For

A Suspense Novel

by

Eileen Dreyer

New York Times bestselling Author

A MAN TO DIE FOR

Awards & Accolades

RITA Winner – Romance Writers of America

Nominated, Anthony Award in mystery

REVIEWS

"A wicked prescription guaranteed to give you sleepless nights." ~Nora Roberts

"Eileen Dreyer creates the sort of skin-crawling suspense that will leave readers looking with a wild and wary eye upon anyone at the other end of a stethoscope."

~Elizabeth George

Control your impulses, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church agreed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.

"Honey, why are we here?"

"I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom."

A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn't exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.

Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she'd never visited this place before. She'd never even known precisely where it was.

A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased the traditional globe lamps that flanked it. Unmarked police cars and crime scene vans hugged the curb. Police in uniform or windbreakers and walkie-talkies hovered near the front door, chatting among themselves. Civilians edged by, sensing their own intrusion, much the way they would enter her hospital.

Casey didn't want to be here. If she could have, she would have approached her friends on the county police force instead. She would have pulled one of them aside when they'd come into her emergency room and proposed her theory in a way that could be considered an inside joke instead of an accusation.

"Say, Bert, what would you think if I said there's something just a little more sinister than fee-splitting going on around here? What if I told you that some of the bad luck around this place is actually connected? And not just because I know all the people involved, either."

Bert would laugh and deflect her fears with common sense, and the issue would have gone no further.

Only none of the crimes Casey suspected had actually happened in the county. Bert wouldn't know anything about them. He couldn't do her any good. If she wanted any relief from the suspicions that had been building over the last few weeks like a bad case of indigestion, she was going to have to find it with the city cops. Cops she didn't know. Cops who didn't know her.

Casey pulled on the heavy glass-and-brass door and winced at its screech of protest. It sounded as if it resented her intrusion. The way everybody else ignored the noise, the door must have been objecting for years.

Inside, the foyer was a high square of marble, cool and hushed. Casey held the heavy door open for her mother to follow inside. Sketching a quick sign of the cross, the little woman instinctively reached for a holy water font.

"It's not a church," Casey reminded her.

It was hell. She was in hell for what she suspected.

A Man to Die For

by

Eileen Dreyer

~

To purchase

A Man to Die For

from your favorite eBook Retailer,

visit Eileen Dreyer's eBook Discovery Author Page

www.ebookdiscovery.com/EileenDreyer

~

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Award-winning author Eileen Dreyer has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, nominated for the Anthony Award (for suspense) and is a retired trauma nurse. Also trained in forensic nursing and death investigation, Eileen doesn't see herself actively working in the field, unless this writing thing doesn't pan out.