In the suspenseful, character-driven storytelling tradition of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and Michael Palmer. Michael Braverman's Darwin's Tears adds another exciting voice to the medical-political thriller genre. Dr. Nathaniel Garland was a broken man. Two years earlier he was a happy, outgoing, overworked Georgetown pediatrician. He loved his job, loved his patients and, more importantly, was profoundly in love with his wife, Daisy. They had a daughter whom Daisy called Breezy because her laughter filled a room with a breeze lighter than air. Garland loved his two ladies more than humanly possible. But then, after witnessing the horrific deaths of both Daisy and Breezy at the hands of a morally bankrupt pharmaceutical company, Garland fell into a deep despondency. His downward spiral led to his contemplating his own demise. At the urging of his old mentor, to help channel his depression and anger, Garland reluctantly agreed to join the CDC's new Biomedical Investigations Agency of which his mentor was the Director. The BIA had barely opened its doors for business when one of its medical agents, Dr. Sarah Levine, had gone missing. Garland immediately launched an intensive investigation to find Sarah. However, his first field operation to arrest and interview a hearse driver whom he believed to have knowledge of Sarah's disappearance was an unmitigated disaster. He had unwittingly stumbled into a sniper's ambush that resulted in the deaths of five bystanders, the hearse driver and a female FBI agent assigned to assist him. Still reeling from that disaster, his investigation takes a dramatic turn when the death of a young girl, brutally and tragically deformed by bizarre medical experimentation, leads Garland, on a deadly hunt for the perpetrators. His quest takes him from the hidden corners of Arkansas to the power corridors of Washington as he uncovers a conspiracy of unimaginable horror.