From national bestselling author Carol Cassella comes the story of one
doctor's struggle to hold her family together through a storm of broken
trust and questioned ethics.
Claire is at the start of her medical career when she falls in love with
Addison Boehning, a biochemist with blazing genius and big dreams. A
complicated pregnancy deflects Claire's professional path, and she is
forced to drop out of her residency. Soon thereafter Addison invents a
simple blood test for ovarian cancer, and his biotech start-up lands a
fortune. Overnight the Boehnings are catapulted into a financial and
social tier they had never anticipated or sought: they move into a
gracious Seattle home and buy an old ranch in the high desert mountains
of eastern Washington, and Claire drifts away from medicine to become a
full-time wife and mother.
Then Addison gambles everything on a cutting-edge cancer drug, and when
the studies go awry, their comfortable life is swept away. Claire and
her daughter, Jory, move to a dilapidated ranch house in rural Hallum,
where Claire has to find a job until Addison can salvage his discredited
lab. Her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health
clinic, but Claire gets more than a second chance at medicine when she
meets Miguela, a bright Nicaraguan immigrant and orphan of the contra
war who has come to the United States on a secret quest to find the
family she has lost. As their friendship develops, a new mystery unfolds
that threatens to destroy Claire's family and forces her to question
what it truly means to heal.
Healer exposes the vulnerabilities of the American family, provoking
questions of choice versus fate, desire versus need, and the duplicitous
power of money.
