Body Language

This is a medical romance about two emergency physicians who know how to function during catastrophe but barely know how to live when nobody is bleeding in front of them. The title comes from Amara Neelan’s drunken confession after a breakup: “I don’t know who I am outside of a clinical setting.” The whole novel is an answer to that sentence.

The book opens in September 2022 with a mass casualty event on Lake Ontario. A fishing vessel, the Jenny Rebecca, collides with a Coast Guard raft and ship during a storm, leaving dozens of people injured or in the water. Elizabeth Blackwell Memorial Hospital is already in crisis: its former emergency medicine chief, William Hildebrand, has just been arrested for sexual assault, and the department is under national scrutiny. Becks, newly installed as chief, freezes. Nicole Harris insists they must go to the scene. Cal Murphy, a widowed former Army surgeon with a prosthetic right leg, takes command and drives staff to Ontario Beach.

There, Cal notices an intern named Amara Neelan. She has packed a pelvic binder and an external fixation kit because she once studied boating injury statistics and remembered that unstable pelvic injuries were a major killer. She and Cal treat a Coast Guard crewman with a catastrophic pelvic fracture in the wet sand. Cal asks who she is. She says, “Amara Neelan, intern.” The scene becomes the foundation of their bond: he sees her intelligence before he even knows her, and she feels, for the first time since her father’s death, that someone believes she belongs.