This is the book for all you lovers of ER, Chicago Hope and Casualty. Connelly worked for nine years as a medic at St Clare's Hospital in New York City, and Bringing Out the Dead is his fictionalised account of the horrors he encountered during the course of his labours. Frank Pierce is his protagonist, a young paramedic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen. Although he is addicted to the job, it is still contriving to drown him in its waking nightmare of ghastliness and horripilation. His wife has left him, he is drinking on the job, and recently he has helped in the induced death of an eighteen-year-old asthmatic girl. The book is truly powerful in its evocation of a sub-stratum of New York life and the wired-to-the-moon characters who inhabit it. Not least of them is Frank's driver, Larry, who keeps a scrapbook of photographs of DOAs, in order to show them to the guys at his volunteer fire department station.