Book cover of Beat the Reaper

Book description

The Doctor will see you now....

Meet Peter Brown, a young Manhattan ER Doctor who has a past he'd prefer to stay hidden. When a figure from the old days emerges it looks increasingly unlikely that his secret will stay intact.
Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is given three months…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked Beat the Reaper as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I was asked to read this book's last couple of chapters—the story of an ex-hitman working as a doctor in the witness protection scheme—as I had unwittingly written a scene similar to Josh's in the second Ben Koenig book, Nobody's Hero.

I ended up devouring the whole book in a single sitting. It had everything. It was violent, incredibly funny, and packed with the kind of medical insider knowledge that could only ever have been written by a surgeon.

It's pretty gross in places, and the scene we'd both inadvertently written was shocking (I changed mine), but it enhances…

A savage, icepick of a hitman novel that will bury itself in your cerebellum. It’s a slippery, sexy book about the making and subsequent unmaking of a contract killer, complete with all the usual trappings and a few resolutely unusual ones. halfway through this novel, I realized that there weren't any rules to this. That you just built humans from scratch and turned them loose in your world and whatever they did, they did. A guy stabs someone with his own fibula in this book. Eat that Macgyver. 

Easily my favorite book ever—one I’ve read or listened to five times—Reaper is a fictional imagining of the double-life of a medical resident at a fictional New York hospital. It is entirely convincing, since Bazell was actually a medical resident (at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center) when he wrote it. Don’t ask me how a resident finds the time to write, but boy did he knock this one out of the park! Reaper is the story of Peter Brnwa (Brown), son of Jewish/Polish war victims, who becomes a mob hitman after being informally adopted by…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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