The Organ Broker
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Organ Broker, named one of five finalists for the 2015 Hammett Prize for literary excellence in the field of crime writing (winner TBA in October of 2016), is the thrilling story of an underground black market organ dealer known as “New York Jack.” For eighteen years Jack has been a “transplant tourism director,” sending wealthy Americans and Europeans in need of kidneys and other organs to third world countries where they would buy them from transplant centers on the take. The death of a client and a newfound relationship lead to a crisis of conscience as he is forced to choose between a two million dollar commission—and participating in a murder. Jack races to South Africa, Brazil, and beyond, just one step ahead of his adversary and the FBI, in search of one small act of redemption.
As a disaffected youth in the late eighties, Jack Trayner entered the criminal world, selling coke when he needed money to pay his way through college. Although he later graduated from law school, an opportunity to earn easy money eventually seduced him into the bizarre and illegal black market for organs—a business that some consider horrendous and a small number of others deem to be heroic. The dual nature of this business assuaged Jack’s guilt and allowed him to flourish, yet the death of a client makes what he is doing all too real. The Organ Broker represents Jack’s confession.
The international black market sale of organs is very real and operates at this very moment behind closed hospital doors in many cities all around the world. It is a world that most people are only vaguely aware exists, and few of us know much, if anything, about, until now—in the pages of the confession of New York Jack.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jack Traynor, the narrator of Strumwasser's pointed, confessional first novel, which is centered on illegal organ transplants, explains the process that took him from peddling drugs through law school to the seminal incident that led him to arrange a kidney transplant for a former classmate. "New York Jack," as he becomes known, establishes a worldwide network of sellers and buyers and, of course, hospitals where the transplants can take place safely. In South Africa, affable Dr. Mel Wolff runs a transplant center and the ruthless but efficient Pierre Kleinhans finds the often desperate donors. In Brazil, Dr. Juan Guillermo is his guy. Trayner's perspective gradually changes as he realizes that there's more to life than helping sick people and getting rich in the process. Readers will learn a lot about such matters as waiting lists, transplant success rates, and the whole sordid business of black-market transplants. While not terribly suspenseful, this is a real eye-opener.