The Cadaver's Ball by Charles Atkins

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Pathological vengeance is the hub on which the plotlines of Charles Atkins's The Cadaver's Ball revolve. Ed Tyson is a respected Manhattan medical school dean with a beautiful wife and a promising future in the field of homeopathic research; but he's harboring an insane grudge. More than a decade earlier in college, a coed he was madly in love with, Beth Stockton, rejected his advances and married his best friend, Peter Grainger. Now, years after Beth's death in an automobile accident, Tyson has decided to enact a little biblical retribution ("Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord" -- Romans 12:19) and destroy Grainger's reputation, life, and career. Tyson's elaborate trap includes a sexy (and borderline suicidal) medical student with a checkered past and the utilization of some highly hallucinogenic vegetation. Will the deranged dean succeed in killing his supposed best friend, or will his own fanaticism destroy him?

While the pacing of The Cadaver's Ball is breakneck and Atkins's smooth, confident narrative voice is utterly readable, there are a few major criticisms: The sociopathic character of Tyson -- who had the potential to be an extraordinarily intelligent and complex villain à la Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter -- is never fully fleshed out, and some of the subplots are highly unlikely, to say the least. And while those implausibilities do slow down the story's momentum to some extent, Atkins's offering will still have fans of psychological thrillers turning the pages until the very end. Paul Goat Allen

From the Publisher

There are times when a trusted “friend” is so filled with hatred that he will do anything possible to ruin the other. Ed, Peter, and Beth had been friends through medical school. At the Cadaver’s Ball, the somewhat ghoulish-named celebration that is the closest thing to a senior prom the hardworking medical students have, Ed confidently presents Beth with an engagement ring.  She reluctantly has to tell him that she has already agreed to marry Peter---and Ed’s life explodes.

From then on, Ed’s main goal is to make Beth realize she made the wrong choice---but fate intervenes.  A car crash takes her life and that of the baby she and Peter had been expecting. Peter was the one driving, and the accident comes close to wrecking his own life irretrievably.

Beth’s death torches Ed’s blazing hatred of Peter and he builds a complex and terrible program to destroy Peter. Peter doesn’t suspect the cause of his growing difficulties until he becomes a suspect in the death of a patient. He must find a way to reclaim his life---if it is not already too late.

In this riveting psychological thriller, Charles Atkins demonstrates his rare skill for creating passionate characters with a range of motivations, from obsession and vengeance to self-preservation.

Publishers Weekly

Weak characterizations and rampant implausibilities undermine this psychological thriller from Atkins (Risk Factor). Sociopathic medical student Ed Tyson vows revenge after Beth, a gorgeous fellow med student, spurns him for his academic rival, Peter Grainger, whom she marries. More than a decade later, Tyson is dean of NYU's med school and has gotten Grainger a teaching position at that institution, soon after the latter survives a car accident that claims Beth's life. Using Ann Walsh, an attractive, mentally fragile young student who resembles Beth, as a pawn, Tyson devises a sadistic scheme intended to convict Grainger of murder and worse. Ann just happens to be the estranged daughter of a burned-out writer who just happens to be the former lover of the female detective assigned to investigate the murder meant to be pinned on Grainger. Tyson's simplistic motivations and the absence of a closing twist make this a routine effort at best. Agent, Al Zuckerman. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Atkins (The Portrait, 1998, etc.) showcases an eminent psychiatrist who, years after losing his love to a colleague, hatches a monstrous plot for revenge. Dr. Peter Grainger has been tormented by guilt ever since he swerved his car into a stone wall, killing his wife and their unborn daughter. He'd be even more unnerved if he knew that Beth Grainger was the love of his friend Dr. Ed Tyson's life, and that Tyson, though he solaced himself by marrying a gorgeous cardiologist and plunging into the development of miracle drugs that have vaulted him to the deanship of Peter's Greenwich Village medical school, has been inconsolable ever since. Now the time is ripe for Tyson's revenge. First he manipulates Peter into taking on the case of Ann Walsh, a suicidal medical student with a propensity for sleeping with her therapists and a raging, vindictive father. Then he slips Peter a dose of the sinister designer drug T2745 and plots a murder with Peter as the patsy. When Det. Nicole Sullivan, struggling with her own traumatic memories, falls for Peter instead of reading him his rights, Tyson strikes again. How can Peter outwit an enemy who combines the skills of a shaman, a mimic, a hacker and wiretapper, and a world-class headshrinker?Intense and immensely entertaining for those who don't mind going over the top in the company of a villain whose tactics include everything but shape-shifting.

Product Details

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Cadaver's Ball

Dorchester Publishing

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-8439-5757-3

Chapter One

"Ralph, I'm going to get coffee. You want anything?" he
asked, as his assistant busily recording the vital signs of
test rats.

"I'm good, thanks."

"I won't be long," Ed said, appearing calm. "I just want to
clear my head," and without further discussion he bolted out
the door. He glanced back to insure he wasn't being observed.
He held still, making certain that there were no workmen in
the morgue, which was in the final stage of its move.
Satisfied, he headed away from the elevators and toward the
labyrinthine tunnels that connected Fleming to University
Hospital. It was also the only remaining entrance to this
section of the medical school that didn't require a pass code.
That too would change in a couple days.

The tunnels were the domain of the janitorial, kitchen and the
maintenance staffs. When Ed had been a student, the on-call
rooms had been on the fourth floor ofFleming, so every
resident and student knew these underground passages that
allowed you to get from building to building-a handy thing in
the dead of winter.

Over the years, Ed had explored these tunnels; he knew where
to duck when the pipes cut the head room down to under five
feet, or which door led to the maintenance-floors
staircase-part of the novel infrastructure, he'd conceived and
had funded for University Hospital and the attached Cancer
Center. Architects from around the world now flocked to the
hundred-year-old structure, which fifteen years ago, had been
written off as not viable. The maintenance floors-all his
idea-with their five-foot ceilings, had been built above the
patient wards. In the newly created spaces, all of the
internal systems-ductwork, sprinklers, electric, oxygen,
computer cable, etc.-could be upgraded and concealed. It had
been dubbed 'room wrapping' and become an industry model.

What Ed had never shared with the architects, was his real
purpose. These spaces allowed him unobserved access to
patient. Every day, he had his pick of four-hundred human
subjects already hooked to monitoring equipment. All he
needed was to select the appropriate candidate by scanning the
hospital's census data. If he needed three, forty-year-old
males to study the cardiac effects of a new compound they were
just a couple clicks away. If he had to study the combination
of two drugs in an elderly woman, no problem-her name's Hattie
Field-she's on 8 West. And when he had needed to determine
the lethal dose of T2745, what better way than with a young
hoodlum-John C. Carroll-shot in the leg by a cop, following a
vicious attack on a female store clerk. In cases like that he
would think of his father, and realize that on top of
everything else he was providing a service to the community.
No expensive trials, or the cost of jail, no subjecting the
victim to the terror of having to face her attacker. A
worthless life had been ended and redeemed by its value to
science.

His competitors wondered how he was able to push his drugs
through the FDA faster than anyone. He had a reputation for
getting it right, for knowing the side effects and safety
profile of each compound well before it went into human
studies. The answer was simple, by the time he got FDA
approval for human investigation, he'd already run the tests.

But now, his thoughts were far from experimental medicine as
he ran up the metal stairs, skipping every other step, his
footfalls sure and silent. His ears, like sonar, scanned for
any human presence.

As he got to the fourth floor-one of his favorites,
specifically because of the ICU and the superb ability to
monitor human subjects-he crouched through a four-foot door
and found his way to the space above Ann's room.

He bent down and looked through a crack between an outflow
vent and a ceiling tile. He felt a rush of relief as he saw
that she was still on the ventilator and alone. As he eased
the tile up, he glimpsed a uniformed policeman's back through
her open door; his chest tightened. He knew that from the
waist up, she was invisible from the nursing station. Only if
someone were in the room, or standing in the door, could they
see what he was about to do. But if the officer should turn
or if he had mistimed the nurse's fifteen-minute
checks.... disaster.

He glanced at Ann's face, she looked younger without makeup,
almost innocent. His eyes traced her two intravenous lines.
They had stopped giving her blood so the line on the left was
now stoppered with a heparin lock. The one on the right was
dripping, and it appeared that an antibiotic had been added to
the bag. Perhaps she'd developed pneumonia. Maybe she'd die
on her own.

A fluttering of her lids caught his attention, and then they
opened; she stared up at the ceiling, up at him.

His breath caught, at first thinking there was no way she
could see him hidden in the shadows. Her eyes bulged, raw
fear was in her face.

He started to panic. If she moved, or made a commotion the
guard would be in. He'd get away, but how long before they
took the tube out and she started to blab? But she didn't
move, just staredd. "Oh, Ann" he whispered, realizing that
they had paralyzed her in to keep her from bucking the
ventilator. She couldn't move.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coiled-steel
angioplasty catheter. Normally, this would be snaked up a
patient's femoral artery and into their heart or carotid
artery to either inject dye or to blast open a blockage. The
beauty of the hollow-tube design was that it allowed for a
variety of functions, everything from taking pictures with a
fiber-optic camera to drilling through cartilage. For Ed, the
eight foot, instrument was perfect for other things, such as
administering drugs from a distance.

Lying flat, he swung the catheter toward the rubber-capped
heparin lock embedded in Ann's arm. He brushed against it on
the first try and attempted to grab it with the claw-like
surgical clamp on the tip. The metal teeth closed on empty
air.

He swore as he swung it back for a second try. His hands, one
bracing the other, started to tremble. He maneuvered through
empty space, trying to slow the distant-end of the instrument;
he hovered by the heparin lock, opened the clamp, and just as
he pressed to release the teeth, her arm moved. "No," he
hissed, feeling the seconds slip away. He glanced anxiously
at the officer's back, it didn't budge. Then he looked at Ann
directly below him, her blue eyes were wide open, tears
streamed, and she was trembling, trying to move, trying to
save herself.

"No," rage built. He swung the catheter into position. The
clamp encircled the heparin lock, he pressed the release and
grabbed onto the rubber tip. "Yes." He fished out the
syringe loaded with an ampoule of concentrated Potassium
Chloride.

He stared into her eyes, he could hear her silent scream. He
paused briefly, remembering how when he had made love to her,
she had become Beth.

"Die," he mouthed and depressed the plunger sending the KCl as
a rapid push down the catheter and into her arm. He counted
to two; released the clamp, and as her bedside monitor started
to beep, he yanked the wire, replaced the ceiling tile and
ran.

He reminded himself to stop at Starbucks, and he was back in
his laboratory with a double latte, all in the span of a
longish coffee break.

"So how's the esterified compound coming," he asked Ralph, his
expression bland.

"You know," his assistant admitted, "one tiny change and it
throws everything off."

Ed nodded, while picturing Ann's blue eyes staring up at him,
"it happens that way. What's the problem? Dosing?
Duration?"

"All of the above," Ralph said. "It works great with some of
the rats, but others seem to shake it off."

"You might want to stabilize it with a methyl group," he
commented, knowing that even as he spoke the ICU staff would
be performing CPR on Ann. They would pump her full of drugs
and try to restart her heart with jolts of electricity. In
the end, they would fail, and at autopsy they would report
that she had died of a massive coronary secondary to blood
loss. Her death was now a homicide.

"Huh, I hadn't thought of that," Ralph said.

"It'll put less stress on the chemical bond; it won't break
apart as easily. Of course, it might not break apart at all,
but it's at least worth trying."

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it," Ed said, and satisfied that he'd made his
presence real, he retreated to his office and booted up his
computer, desperate to access Ann's monitor, needing to know
that she was finally dead.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cadaver's Ball
by Charles Atkins
Copyright © 2006 by Charles Atkins .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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