John Lockwood, a young vascular surgeon, moves to California to an HMO position with his wife Carla and sixteen year old son Tim. Conflicts of interest inside the HMO are minimized in his mind in deference to the promising new opportunity.
John soon gets a strong dose of those conflicts, when a patient dies from needless delay in treatment. Further into the clutches of the HMO, he is strong-armed into doing human testing of their new surgical implant. The research goes well, and both his son and brother receive an implant. But there are unexplained disasters.
The implant seems to virtually stalk a specific group of patients and kills them. To find the culprits, Carla discovers a crucial piece of evidence and is kidnapped.
The author takes you behind the scenes to reveal how the experts handle such dire disasters.
When the cause of the disasters is found, it is suddenly a race against time and the elements to stop the next one. Can John save his own son? It's a close call that takes him to a small hospital in snow country, before this hair raising thriller comes to a photo finish between death and Dr. Lockwood, a race too close to call until the last chapter, where another life is grasped from the jaws of death in this medical mystery.