Books by Ken Brigham

At fifteen, Blanche Nero watches the electrocution of her Italian immigrant father, punishment for an inexplicable, brutal murder he has committed. She resolves to do something with her life that values humanity over justice, mercy over sacrifice. After a grueling but successful academic career, Blanche is almost sixty. Her long career as a trauma surgeon in New Orleans has been abruptly ended by Hurricane Katrina. She leases a small flat in Venice, seeking an understanding of her father in the place where he lived his formative years. On a cold morning in Piazza San Marco, Blanche meets Count Lorenzo Ludovici (Ludo), an aging, elegant, and mortally ill Venetian. As he introduces her to his beautiful city and his health deteriorates, Blanche becomes ever more fond of the count. Through a series of conversations, Blanche and Ludo discover 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 new sense of liberation.

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 savoring good times and exotic destinations when they came his way. This tragic sense has also fueled 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.

Former Nashville detective and Rhodes Scholar, Shane Hadley, hasn't 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 Bonz's Booze and Music, lying dead in front of his club. Shane's wife, neurologist Katya Karpov, is doubly alarmed by the murder-she was fond of the old man, and also, she knows that he was taking an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease that was invented by Katya's 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 Shane's uncanny intuitions, launching the two of them on a quest through the worlds of country music, academic intrigue, shady business dealings, and pervasive amorality.Under growing pressure from the Nashville media and a crusading lawyer, as well as higher-ups in the police department, the two unlikely allies race to make sense of a seemingly pointless murder that threatens to destroy almost everyone who gets drawn into the mystery.