Bringing Out the Dead

Perhaps only someone who has worked for almost a decade as a medic in New York City's Hell's Kitchen—as Joe Connelly has—could write a novel as riveting and fiercely authentic as Bringing Out the Dead. Like a front-line reporter, Connelly writes from deep within the experience, and the result is a debut novel of extraordinary power and intensity.

In Frank Pierce, a brash EMS medic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen, Connelly gives us a man who is being destroyed by the act of saving peopl...