Mortal Choice: A Medical Mystery by David Shactman; Trenton, Georgia: BookLocker.com; © 2025; ISBN 9781959-622550; 289 pages plus appendices; hardcover $30.95; Publication date June 16.
SAN DIEGO – The main character in this mystery novel is Cassandra Crawford, a Black FBI agent whose young daughter Keri must submit three times per week to dialysis, her kidney disease traceable to a bite by a venomous snake.
Cassandra is given an undercover assignment by her superiors in the Boston branch of the FBI: To obtain a black-market kidney for her daughter and to schedule, but not go through with, the transplant soon thereafter. The FBI will need the un-transplanted kidney as evidence in its efforts to bust a human-organ-stealing ring, a big and growing illegal business.
Author Shactman deftly paints the moral dilemma the FBI has thus foisted upon Cassandra. Should she disobey orders and allow the life-saving transplant to go forward? “Wouldn’t a loving mother do almost anything to save her daughter’s life … What if Keri never gets another kidney?”
Cassandra ponders the moral cost of enabling “criminal organizations who take advantage of the desperately poor; who kidnap people for organs; who pay unscrupulous doctors to remove organs from unsuspecting people undergoing surgery; who kill people for their organs and murder those that might expose their organization…”
Then, she considers what might happen if the sale of human organs was decriminalized: “Thousands of people die of kidney disease every year; while thousands of other people are perfectly willing to sell their kidneys and save those peoples’ lives.” What is the moral difference between selling a kidney, which is illegal, and the sale of human blood, hair, sperm, or eggs, which are all legal? “What right do we have to tell the seller that they do not have autonomous control of their own body?”
Martin Goldberg, a Boston police detective and friend of Cassandra, meanwhile investigates murders that appear to be related to human organ trafficking. He and Cassandra compare notes and routinely check in with each other. Could the relationship between Goldberg, a single, paunchy, White, Jewish policeman, and Cassandra develop into something more amorous? Both characters speculate about their similarities, both having grown up poor and as members of a minority group.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.
The books you choose to review are always interesting. Good job!