PULSE

A transplant patient finds that he’s bought into a lot more than another man’s heart, in this greased-lightning thriller from the Pulitzer-winning crime reporter best known for her Britt Montero mysteries (Margin of Error, 1997, etc.). Overwhelmed with gratitude at the donor whose heart saved his life, Frank Douglas isn’t satisfied with all the rules about confidentiality; despite his private eye’s warning that the man who gave him a second chance at life probably wasn’t a model citizen—now that traffic fatalities are down, most organ donors are shooting victims—he wants to locate the donor’s family and thank them. And the donor he finds, suicidal businessman Daniel Alexander, turns out to be too good to be true: a man who piled up a substantial estate and left behind a tender note for his wife Rory before he blew his brains out. But just as Frank’s disturbing dreams and flashbacks (as if his new heart were remembering its old life) are starting to get to him, and his family’s behavior—his own wife Kathleen doesn’t like the time he’s spending with Rory; his teenaged daughter Shandi is defying her grounding and seeing a much older man—Frank starts to find holes in the official story of Daniel’s death. In the weeks before he died, it turns out, he carefully cleaned out all the nest eggs he’d left for Rory; his body was cremated as soon as its vital organs had been harvested; and his closemouthed ex-partner Ron Harrington is killed minutes before his meeting with Frank. Could Daniel have been murdered, despite all the forensic evidence—or could he still be alive, leaving Frank with a stranger’s heart? There’s no leisure to worry about the subtleties of these questions, because Frank’s growing intimacy with Rory has Kathleen putting pressure on him back home—pressure that’ll chase him from Florida all the way to the Pacific one step ahead of the police. Buchanan rides her irresistible premise hell-for-leather all the way to the fairy-tale ending. (Author tour)