Bringing Out the Dead

Frank Pierce has given CPR on dance floors. He's seen an 11-year-old boy shot off his bicycle and brought a bartender back to life on top of his own bar while Irish music played. Frank is an EMS medic in New York's Hell's Kitchen, a profession that subjects him to endless, careening nights tending to the cities most desperate and neglected patients, but has him hooked on the addictive thrill of saving lives. Increasingly, it seems to be Frank who needs saving. Abandoned by his wife, haunted by the ghost of the girl he helped kill and the protracted agony of a man he should have let die, Frank Pierce is an authentically wounded hero. In his riveting first novel, Joe Connelly, himself a New York City medic, straps us into Frank's ambulance and stomps down on the gas. And Bringing Out the Dead is a work of gripping verisimilitude and breakneck speed.