REVENGE

Sowyak’s third medical thriller to feature Maggie Blanchard chronicles the Charlotte nurse’s attempts to balance her job at a busy hospital and her marriage to a billionaire.

Nurse Maggie Blanchard has her life turned upside down when her husband Kerrington—“a billionaire twenty times over [who] carried a powerful reputation on Wall Street”—inexplicably contracts a deadly virus. As the highly infectious disease (which is described as “a virus so potent it could easily and quickly wipe out a country—even the world”) eats away at Kerrington’s body, Maggie, with the help of close friend and fellow nurse Benny Maxwell, desperately tries to link her husband’s sickness to a top-secret subterranean biohazardous lab secreted away on her mansion’s sprawling estate. Complicating matters is their friend Dr. Sunday Richardson and her potentially career-ending problems associated with a gravely ill patient (who happens to be a well-known malpractice lawyer) and his manipulative wife who, prior to his hospitalization, found out about his infidelity with a beautiful ER doctor. While the high-intensity hospital setting and numerous medically-driven storylines (like that of a young Jehovah’s Witness who receives a blood transfusion that jeopardizes his eternal life) are compelling, the fuel that powers this narrative engine is the intriguing ensemble cast of characters, who display engaging depth and dynamism. Maggie and Kerrington’s respective arcs—and their surprisingly affecting love story—are obviously the primary foci, but Benny’s romantic entanglement with his daughter’s new au pair, Sunday’s impending divorce from her emotionally detached husband (“Unemotional and cold. I felt like I was meeting with my banker to discuss interest rates”), and Kerrington’s actress sister and her struggles with her alcoholic spouse are just a few of the entertaining secondary narrative threads that will keep readers turning pages.

A highly palatable fusion of medical thriller and daytime drama.