The Graft

Dr. Walter Hargrove lost his medical license eleven years ago for trying to save a boy the rules said couldn't be saved. He never stopped trying.

Now, in a converted veterinary research station deep in the Pacific Northwest, he believes he has finally solved the problem that ended his career — and he needs subjects nobody will report missing. Dale. Connie. Toby. Grace. Earl. Five people the world already stopped looking for, lured off the street with the promise of a bed and a hot meal.

His experiments work. That is the horror of it.

Grafted with animal strength, animal speed, animal healing — and animals grafted, in turn, with human hands and human cunning — Hargrove's subjects become something the medical establishment would call miraculous, if the medical establishment ever found out. All that stands between them and a lifetime in his compound is a caseworker named Nora Hale, who has never once stopped counting the names of the people she couldn't save, and who isn't ready to add five more to that list.

THE GRAFT is a story about what happens when the people society throws away turn out to be exactly the people someone else has been looking for — for entirely the wrong reasons.