Ken Brigham – författare

In a collection of memories resembling pages snatched from a scrapbook, a leading physician and academic researcher reflects on the unpredictability of life. Medical school at Vanderbilt led to a series of life-altering experiences. A brief stint collecting blood samples from freshly slaughtered cattle in a Nashville abattoir left him with bespattered shirts and a dark apprehension of the closeness of death. Throughout his career, the polarity and inseparability of life and death have haunted him, a platform for savouring good times and exotic destinations when they came his way. This tragic sense has also fuelled Dr Brigham's avocation of writing fiction, including several published novels in which university hospitals provide the backdrop for tales of mystery, ambition, and suspense. Now retired, the author looks back at a life that carried him to a series of academic pinnacles -- The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; the CDC in Atlanta; the University of California, San Francisco; once more to Vanderbilt, in Nashville; and then, finally, to Atlanta's Emory University.

At fifteen Blanche Nero watches the electrocution of her Italian immigrant father, punishment for the inexplicable brutal murder of his recently acquired friend Old Man Flaherty. She resolves to do something with her life that values humanity over justice, mercy over sacrifice. But she is forever haunted by the mystery of her father. She is also drawn irresistibly to the bigger human mysteries of violence and death. After a gruelling but successful academic career at some of the nation's finest university hospitals, Blanche is almost sixty. Her long career as a trauma surgeon at Charity Hospital in New Orleans has been abruptly ended by Hurricane Katrina. She takes a year sabbatical from the medical school and leases a small flat in Venice, seeking an understanding of her father in the place where he lived his formative years--and of herself by reliving and recording her own remarkable life. On a cold morning in Piazza San Marco, Blanche meets Count Lorenzo Ludovici (Ludo), an aging, elegant, and charming Venetian who is dying of AIDS. Blanche is drawn to him and is uncharacteristically self-revealing. As he introduces her to his beautiful city as their relationship develops and is health deteriorates Blanche becomes ever more fond of the count. As she relives her past by writing down what she remembers, she sees the girl she was and the woman she became with new eyes; the mystery of her father's death; her distant mother; her sometimes misguided adolescent efforts to grow up. And then discovering the thrill of medicine, especially the sensual trill of trauma surgery and losing herself in in that career, immersed in violence. She recalls her attempts at relationships, especially with Jesse Pinto, the one man whom she has ever loved, and how she ended that. She remembers her love affair with the Big Easy and Charity Hospital (the Big Free) that came suddenly to a violent end. Through a series of painful and revealing conversations, Blanche and Ludo discover that each of them has private knowledge of interlocking pieces of their history. Blanche feels sadness of a depth that she has not felt before, but also a strange sense of freedom. Perhaps, at last, she is ready to begin her life.

At fifteen Blanche Nero watches the electrocution of her Italian immigrant father, punishment for the inexplicable brutal murder of his recently acquired friend Old Man Flaherty. She resolves to do something with her life that values humanity over justice, mercy over sacrifice. But she is forever haunted by the mystery of her father. She is also drawn irresistibly to the bigger human mysteries of violence and death. After a gruelling but successful academic career at some of the nation's finest university hospitals, Blanche is almost sixty. Her long career as a trauma surgeon at Charity Hospital in New Orleans has been abruptly ended by Hurricane Katrina. She takes a year sabbatical from the medical school and leases a small flat in Venice, seeking an understanding of her father in the place where he lived his formative years--and of herself by reliving and recording her own remarkable life. On a cold morning in Piazza San Marco, Blanche meets Count Lorenzo Ludovici (Ludo), an aging, elegant, and charming Venetian who is dying of AIDS. Blanche is drawn to him and is uncharacteristically self-revealing. As he introduces her to his beautiful city as their relationship develops and is health deteriorates Blanche becomes ever more fond of the count. As she relives her past by writing down what she remembers, she sees the girl she was and the woman she became with new eyes; the mystery of her father's death; her distant mother; her sometimes misguided adolescent efforts to grow up. And then discovering the thrill of medicine, especially the sensual trill of trauma surgery and losing herself in in that career, immersed in violence. She recalls her attempts at relationships, especially with Jesse Pinto, the one man whom she has ever loved, and how she ended that. She remembers her love affair with the Big Easy and Charity Hospital (the Big Free) that came suddenly to a violent end. Through a series of painful and revealing conversations, Blanche and Ludo discover that each of them has private knowledge of interlocking pieces of their history. Blanche feels sadness of a depth that she has not felt before, but also a strange sense of freedom. Perhaps, at last, she is ready to begin her life.

Former Nashville detective and Rhodes Scholar, Shane Hadley, hasnt been involved in a murder case since a stray bullet transected his spinal cord, ending his career and stranding him in a wheelchair. One Sunday morning, the familiar pop,pop,pop of gunshots draws Shane like a magnet. He wheels himself onto the balcony of his apartment overlooking Printers Alley, the once-beating heart of Music City USA. There, he sees Bonz Bagley, proprietor of Bonzs Booze and Music, lying dead in front of his club. Shanes wife, neurologist Katya Karpov, is doubly alarmed by the murdershe was fond of the old man, and also, she knows that he was taking an experimental drug for Alzheimers disease that was invented by Katyas boss at the university. Hardy Seltzer, the police detective assigned to the case, knows Shane as a department legend from before the accident that sidelined him. When fate brings them together, Hardy takes advantage of Shanes uncanny intuitions as they race to find the murderer.