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THE PRICE OF LIFE

Eight-year-old Jennifer Haller’s brain tumor is killing her. A timely CT scan would likely have saved her, and a new surgery offers hope for a cure, but Julie Haller is crushed when their insurance company refuses to pay for her daughter’s operation. Shortly after Jennifer’s diagnosis, Marine Captain Ed Haller loses his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq. He comes home to rehabilitate while Jennifer wages her own losing battle with cancer and its treatment. Jennifer’s death leads the family to Fort Worth lawyer Grant Mercer, whom they hire to sue Jennifer’s neurologist. As Mercer works the case, Julie Haller learns the results of recent tort reform efforts, including a $250,000 limit in medical malpractice cases. She and her husband realize that a quarter-million dollar price tag on a beloved eight-year-old girl is simply inconceivable. They have no interest in the money, focusing instead on their responsibility to honor their daughter by seeking justice for her death. The murders of a lobbyist in Austin, a state senator on a remote country road, and an insurance executive in New York seem unrelated until Jennifer’s doctor is kidnapped. Mercer makes the disturbing connection between the victims and his case, and discovers how far some people will go when the usual avenues of justice are too sharply curtailed.

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GREG MCCARTHY is an author and attorney. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University School of Law. For twenty-four years, he has practiced law in Dallas and all over Texas, with a primary focus on personal injury cases. He has represented both plaintiffs and defendants in cases involving medical malpractice, transportation, oil and gas, premises liability, and commercial litigation, and has tried dozens of cases to juries as lead counsel. For the first eighteen years of his practice, he devoted the majority of his time to representing plaintiffs in medical malpractice actions. He lives with his family in Arlington, where he is working on his next novel.