Marker, by Robin Cook

This audiobook was obtained from Netlibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 16 hours and 7 minutes long, and was narrated by George Guidall.

Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton are both doctors with the Medical Examiner's office. They determine cause of death by day and are lovers by night. Right about the time that Laurie decides that she has no future with the noncommittal Jack, she takes notice of some unusual deaths at a particular hospital. The deaths have no apparent cause. Everyone else is willing to call them an anomaly. But the decedents are all relatively young people who came in for pretty ordinary surgeries. She begins to suspect foul play.

Laurie comes under a lot of pressure to bury her suspicions. To infer that someone is murdering patients at a prestigious hospital with a low death rate could create problems for the reputation of the medical staff there. Her only ally is the handsome, charming doctor who is the director of personnel at that hospital, who wants to get involved with her.

I know this sounds like a soap opera, and some of it is. It also sounds like the typical Robin Cook novel: young, good-looking doctor with strong ethics runs afoul of rich, powerful, greedy medical community. But Cook has been doing this for a long time, and knows just how much relationship fog to give a book without losing sight of the fact that he is writing a thriller. This is one of his better ones, and I give it 3 stars.