Dr. Jud Tyler had almost decided that it had been a mistake to come back to Framingham, and his first sight of the old hospital building--in an advanced stage of dilapidation--only strengthened that conviction. But waiting inside those grimy walls was a world Dr. Tyler had never known, and Dr. Tyler's confrontation with it would leave them both profoundly changed forever. Some of the people in that world:
Chuck Rogers: Jud Tyler's Army Chaplain in Vietnam, now fighting another kind of war in a slum hospital.
Asa Ford: the Superintendent of St. Luke's Hospital whose ethics have slipped so far that he is about to fall over them.
Samantha Fellowes: rich, young, beautiful divorcee whose need for a doctor has nothing to do with medicine.
Eric Cates: a voice of reason among the town's black militants who is willing to pay his debt to the white man who made his education possible--even when it puts him in danger.
Kathryn Galloway: beautiful, red-haired nurse whose super-efficiency hides a heart bruised once too often in the game of love.
Angus Claiborne: millionaire slum-lord, who is just about to discover how expensive sub-standard housing can be--to the owner.
These are some of the people who help make Frank Slaughter's novel a fascinating, dramatic excursion into some of the simmering situations that threaten to explode in cities all across the nation.
CODE FIVE
FRANK G. SLAUGHTER
"Code Five! Code Five!" The man at the head of the stretcher shouted and his words signalled the gravest of all emergency conditions--cardiac arrest. But the words might well have been sounded for St. Luke's Hospital itself--overcrowded, understaffed, run-down, a veritable dumping ground for all the city's charity cases--for her heart also seemed to have stopped. Only one man had any hope for her future, and that hope was centered on a bitter, war-wounded, unhappy surgeon with crippled hands.
