Code White

In Britz-Cunningham’s entertaining debut, the media spotlight is on Chicago’s Fletcher Memorial Medical Center, as a team of neurosurgeons seeks a major breakthrough. A seven-year-old boy, Jamie Winslow, lost his sight at age three as the result of an arteriovenous malformation in his brain. Dr. Richard Helvelius and Dr. Ali O’Day plan to rectify the problem by removing the growth and substituting a specialized computer that will restore Jamie’s vision. But in the middle of the delicate procedure, a Code White indicates that there’s a bomb in the hospital. The author, a staff radiologist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, nicely combines the effort to insure the operation’s success and the patient’s recovery with the race to find and defuse the bomb and identify those responsible for the threat. The few elements of soap opera won’t stop readers from frantically turning the pages to see what happens next. Agent: Al Zuckerman, Writers House. (Apr.)