In her debut adventure, Monika Everhardt, head nurse of the intensive care unit at St. Teresa's hospital, learns that a young woman who bled to death following an abortion was never pregnant. She sets out to find why the young woman died. Did the nurse assigned to care for her, abandon her? Why didn't the staff physician who volunteers at the only remaining abortion clinic in the city recognize her when he admitted her? Where was her husband-an Army ranger supposedly away for training-when she was killed? As her family threatens to sue and the hospital grapples with financial problems and anti-abortion protestors, a bomb threat becomes increasingly real. Fearing for the safety of her patients and the reputation of her staff, Monika is drawn into a personal quest to uncover the truth.

FIRST EDITION, June 2010 Worldwide mass mass market paperback, Eleanor Sullivan (Cover Her Body). The intensive care unit at St. Teresa's hospital in St. Louis is head nurse Monika Everhardt's personal war zone—understaffed, overworked, tangled in union and government bureaucracy. And that's on a good day. On a bad day, two suspicious deaths make her wonder if one of her own is a killer. As police and pencil pushers descend, Monika takes matters into her own hands with the help of top cop and best girlfriend, BJ.

Two gravely injured head trauma patients—and two mysteries—arrive in nurse Monika Everhardt's ICU on the same day. The first is a John Doe whose car crashed during a high-speed police chase. The second is a woman who was bludgeoned in a bank parking lot. Police suspect the victim's husband. But Monika knows genuine grief when she sees it and she's got her eye on someone else: the husband's ex-wife. Things get interesting when Monika's friend believes the John Doe may be her long lost brother, presumed dead for several years. But if he is, what was he doing with a stolen car from Texas and the ID of a dead man from New York? As Monika uncovers pieces of the shocking truth about why these patients ended up in her care, the hectic daily routine of life and death…becomes murder.