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A NEW FEMALE SLEUTH YOU’LL LOVE—JUST DON'T MESS WITH HER! "… a medical thriller not for the squeamish.” -Publishers Weekly.Meet Nurse Gina She’s feisty, determined, tenacious, and a ballsy Italian ex-Bronxite. She might remind you a bit of Sandra Bullock when Sandra’s in FBI mode, because you know how scary nurses can be; and how compassionate. Gina’s patients are in danger. And everyone at her fancy San Francisco hospital is blowing it off like everything’s normal.Carl Chapman, a young man with an excellent prognosis, has already died--and another patient’s acting weird and desperate; a third, a teen-ager, has actually run away.Gina soon finds out her patients are being subjected to a diabolical form of blackmail after being blasted with chemotherapy and every other toxic poison available to save their lives. Most days they're so run down they're more dead than alive. But there’s one chance for survival—each will be infused with his or her own treated bone marrow – frozen, secure in the hospital’s storage vaults.And then comes the “We have your marrow...pay $50,000 or die now!"Before it's over, Gina will be stalked, threatened, and nearly killed. This is an action-packed, shocking, take-no-prisoners tale of medical suspense, definitely not for the faint-hearted. But fans of the more hard-boiled medical thrillers (and also of Patricia Cornwell) will eat it up; as will lovers of strong women sleuths, hospital mysteries, and all medical fiction, especially fans of Tess Gerritsen, Carolyn McCray, Eileen Dreyer, Lisa Genova, and Robin Cook.

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 28, 2013

527 people are currently reading
830 people want to read

About the author

Bette Golden Lamb

19 books26 followers
Bette was a nurse, a writer, and an artist. Her art work has appeared in numerous show and is held in many private collections.

Bette was from the Bronx, and she said that growing up in New York City coupled with being an RN was a clue as to why she loved to write dark and gritty medical thrillers. A Marin county writer and artist, she and JJ spent some time in the wilds of Virginia City, Nevada, an isolated throwback to the old West, where she was a trauma nurse while her husband was the editor of the The Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper Mark Twain once ran.

Bette and J. J. Lamb have written novels that include a female serial killer who thinks she’s on a noble mission to save barren women from a life of despair (Sisters in Silence) and the Gina Mazzio RN medical thriller “Bone” series (Bone Dry, Sin & Bone, Bone Pit, Bone of Contention, Bone Dust, Bone Crack, Bone Slice, Bone Point). She said that writing about Gina Mazzio and her boyfriend, Harry, also an RN, was a fun experience, as well as a privilege to write about people who dedicate their lives to helping others.

Bette's most recent novel The Russian Girl was based on a true story of a woman who escapes from a high security nursing home during the hottest day of the year. Her delirium reveals a harrowing story of a young immigrant Russian girl forced to come to America in the early 1900s. Her turbulent life is filled with upheaval, lost love, and activism in a crushing, brutal 20th century journey.

Bette was encouraging to and supportive of new writers and artists.

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5 stars
439 (32%)
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464 (33%)
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323 (23%)
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110 (8%)
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32 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 126 reviews
Profile Image for Jean.
887 reviews19 followers
July 21, 2016
To call Gina Mazzio a “detective” is stretching things a bit. She’s an RN. To her hospital administrator, she may be a snoop and a busybody. To her patients, on the other hand, she is a watchdog, even a guardian angel. Nurse Gina is devoted to caring for her patients. She is tough, gritty, purposeful, and compassionate. She is a gal from the Bronx with Italian roots. Need I say more?

In Bone Dry: An Action-Packed Medical Technothriller, a patient awaiting his bone marrow engraftment rapidly declines and dies. His marrow went missing from the lab, and Gina is determined to find out why. The reader learns early on who is behind it, and why. That in no way diminishes the drama of the storyline as we follow Gina through her stressful job as a nurse on the oncology unit. We see other patients in the same situation as the man who died. Gina suspects, but the victims have been threatened that they must keep quiet.

I’m not sure if the medical portions are medically accurate, although since the author is a nurse, I felt that they were convincing. The responses of the hospital staff and administrator seemed expedited beyond what seems likely in a bureaucratic facility such as a major hospital, but I’m willing to suspend some belief for the sake of the dramatic. The personal relationships between the characters, Gina and her boyfriend Harry, and on the flip side, between the marrow-nappers, were well written. Yes, there is violence. It defines the relationship between Faye and Frankie.

Is Bone Dry a great book? No, but I still found it hard to put down. It was so readable because the authors made me care about the characters. Gina Mazzio has great instincts when it comes to understanding her patients and anticipating their needs. She knows when something’s not quite right. I loved her devotion to her job and her stick-to-itiveness, despite the risk to her job and her safety. Besides that, anyone who works on an oncology unit and fights someone who takes advantage of cancer patients is one of the good guys.

3.5 stars

Profile Image for Petra.
818 reviews92 followers
June 9, 2017
3.5 stars. Medical thriller with an RN as protagonist. Really liked the main character and her boy-friend. Had problems believing some of the plot. Nevertheless, immensely readable. Fast-paced and surprisingly violent in parts. Fantastic narration by Beth Richmond. Would definitely try another in this series.
Profile Image for Petula.
64 reviews14 followers
September 5, 2015
This books falls in the ranks of "Oh my God, could that really happen?"

Medical thrillers and suspense are one of my new favorite genres as I'm finding I like the way writers' minds work around the day to day life of medical personnel. Bone Dry takes your "average" nurse and a pitiful lab tech along with a critical care sidekick (who can be extremely annoying, by the way) and throws them all into a melting pot of annoying characters.

Truthfully they're not all annoying, but at the risk of revealing too much we'll go with that.

POSSIBLY A BIT OF SPOILERAGE HERE:

Bone Dry touched a little too close to home (I recently had a bone marrow transplant) and that made me sad, angry and ready to throw my Kindle across the room because of the stupidity and weakness of Faye, the "assholedness" of the boyfriend and the roller coaster ride of emotions that each patient displayed.

OKAY, KEEP READING:
I gave this book a 5 because I thoroughly enjoyed it and it kept me interested from start to finish, but it's not the best medical thriller you'll ever read. That said, I'm definitely interested in reading another book by Bette Golden Lamb because I think her ideas are truly grand and will get even more better over time.
Profile Image for Karen B..
457 reviews9 followers
April 10, 2018
his is a fast paced medical thriller which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Gina Mazzio is the kind of R.N. I'd like to have supporting me if I were in the hospital. She is feisty, determined, knowledgeable and caring. From the beginning the reader knows who the bad guy is and watches as Gina tries to befriend a domestically abused lab technician and find out why there are problems with oncology patients receiving their own previously saved bone marrow. The bone marrow is being stolen for extortion. One of Gina's patients has already died and others have their lives hanging by a thread as the extortioners play dangerous games with their lives. The narration of the audible version is excellent and helped to make this an exciting read.
Profile Image for Jacob Peled.
522 reviews11 followers
April 10, 2017
For some reason I couldn’t bond with the book. I think that the reason was its opening "case" that didn’t make much sense to me and was very unbelievable. Later on I found out that although there was a lot of action in the book, the action itself was starched too thin spreading through few pages repeating the same details over and over again. At certain points I started flipping through the pages reading the 1st sentence of each paragraph without losing the main story.
Personally I prefer reading Cook or Palmer.
Profile Image for Teresa.
1,902 reviews33 followers
June 26, 2020
Lots of errors, needed an editor. I liked the idea of the book but I could not get into the inane crime at the beginning of the book
1,929 reviews44 followers
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September 2, 2010
Bone Dry, by Bette Golden Lamb, B-plus, narrated by Beth Richmond, produced by Books in Motion, downloaded from audible.com.

First of all, Beth Richmond is becoming one of my favorite narrators. Of course I have so many. This is a medical thriller. The protagonist is Gina, a nurse in the oncology ward. As Gina is preparing one of her patients for a graft of his own bone marrow back into his blood, they find the man’s marrow is missing from the lab. Gina thinks it is odd because that very day the patient in question, always upbeat, becomes depressed and knows before she tells him, that his bone marrow is missing. Then the man dies. There is to be another bone marrow graft the next day, and Gina is worried about the patient because she seems very depressed when Gina comes to see her on the day of the graft. When asked if she can help, the patient says “only if you have $50,000.” She goes to the lab, and the bone marrow again is missing. But this time later it is in its right place, and Gina gets in trouble for stirring things up. What the reader knows, and no one at the hospital does for quite a while, is that a lab tech and her boy friend are stealing bone marrow and hitting relatives up for money. “You pay $50,000 for your bone marrow back or you die.” There are a few things stretching credibility, but mostly it is a very good book and Richmond does a fabulous job narrating it.
Profile Image for Jill.
42 reviews
August 14, 2017
This book could use a good editor - a number of typos. Mostly, it lacked cohesive characters. I didn't really understand who the main characters were or what they stood for. I didn't connect with them at all. The premise was ok, but the characters really took away from the story.
Profile Image for Sheila Myers.
Author 16 books21 followers
December 14, 2018
A very good plot idea and interesting characters. The formatting errors and typos were too distracting for me to give this one a higher rating.
Profile Image for Lynda Kelly.
2,206 reviews106 followers
April 24, 2018
This is full of mistakes and I just can't be bothered wading my way through them all. It makes for irritated and distracted reading and I was only 23% in but I'd already seen too many.
For some reason speechmarks were the main issue. They keep being missed off and as you're reading it gets confusing and then you realise they stopped speaking but nobody thought to let you know !!
This sentence had an extra word added-"Had this gut feeling about the Chapman right from the beginning" and she writes scarred and it should be scars. Then I had to look up DSMO as Americans love their acronyms but not sharing their meanings.
The story sounded interesting but I'm afraid I'm not up to ploughing my way through this many issues.
I reached this line, which meant nothing and I packed it in-"Get wanted her out of the apartment, Faye"......
Profile Image for Julie R.
70 reviews5 followers
August 16, 2017
My reviews will never be fancy or wordy. This book kept me interested from the beginning. I like medical thriller/mysteries. Early on in the book, you knew who did it, just not how they would get caught. The main character, Gina, is an oncology nurse who I really liked. She didn't know when to close her mouth. Especially when it came to caring for her patients. A pretty quick read. Recommended.
Profile Image for Darlene.
1,969 reviews220 followers
October 7, 2015
My mother wanted me to be a nurse. I think she also wanted me to be a famous pianist. All I can claim is bad back and short fingers. From the time I was a teen, I could see I couldn't be on my feet for very long. How I managed to cosmetologist for a year and a half, I don't know. But mom had some things right. I love knowing how to read music because I love singing. And I do like the life in the hospital. I was a candy striper for a little while, and I saw that I like taking care of the patients. I like the drama of the hospital, and I love the miracle of science that is ever present in the hospital. Hence my addiction with things like Gray's Anatomy and other medical shows. I even like the gruesome ER live dramas. If so when I saw this book on the freebies I thought I'd probably enjoy it. And I was right.

Warning: maybe not the best read for someone who's dealt with cancer. I'd hate to think that the things that happened in this book could easily happen. But I suppose it's possible.

This was an action-packed technothriller. Not so much a mystery. You know from the first page who is the problem. You just hope that the main character can figure it out and live through it. And yes, the main character is a nurse. I did like the character development in this book. And just a bit of a warning: this book may make you forget that there are other things to do in your house besides read.

Though I was able to pick this book up for free it is now $2.99 as are the other books in the series. As soon as I can afford it. I think I may try to read the rest of the series. I think it's worth it.
Profile Image for Elaine.
2,258 reviews2 followers
October 20, 2015
Profile Image for David Freas.
Author 2 books32 followers
November 18, 2017
This mystery had an interesting premise – someone is stealing cancer patients’ bone marrow and holding it for ransom. And it was short at under 250 pages.

But that's all it had going for it.

The Lambs peopled the story with several stock characters – the angry teen, the administrator who cares more about the hospital’s image than that someone is holding its patients’ marrow for ransom, the ‘Doubting Thomases’ who think the main character is full of bunk, the bad guy, the abused woman.

Because the Lambs wrote this book from several POVs and because the bad guy was so obviously bad, there was no real mystery here nor any plot twists. As a result, there wasn’t much tension in the story and no real detection on the part of Gina, the main character.

The back cover blurb calls this book “an action-packed, shocking, take-no-prisoners tale of medical suspense.” It’s not any of those.

There were also tons of production errors in this book – mainly misplaced closing quotation marks.

This book merited a 2-star rating only because I couldn’t rate it 1½ stars (Did nothing for me).

So I won’t be back for more of these books.
Profile Image for Tiffany.
1,431 reviews22 followers
March 2, 2017
I enjoyed book 1 of this series. I had the dream of becoming a doctor when I was younger (learned my mind wasn't made for science, but that's okay) and this was a fun story that made me relive some of my dreams.

I liked the setting of the story and the pace of it. I liked that the case was kept within one floor of the hospital because otherwise the story would have gotten much to big. I liked the characters and their development. I felt the pains and sorrows of the characters and the drive behind each of them. The antagonist was well written and it was interesting to get the story told from all the different perspectives.

I did mark this book down as I was not a fan of some of the language, sex, and the graphic descriptions of abuse. I would recommend the book, but with a warning that it is fairly graphic, so reader beware.
Profile Image for Emma E Frost.
90 reviews
January 10, 2016
Full of unnecessary violence

The premise behind the plot was good, and I was gripped in the early chapters. But there was just too much unnecessary violence. The way the hospital administrator reacted was unrealistic, and the speed with which his "investigation" of her behavior occurred ridiculous. Such a shame that the author went with the mental instability motive when so many other plot devices could have been used to great effect. It is also a shame that the author tried to jam in as much technical jargon as they could. Throwing around big words does not indicate intelligence, and ends up looking stupid when your plot devices stink (literally). p.s. I am a retired medic
Profile Image for April.
638 reviews
January 17, 2018
I found myself putting this book down several times ... the villains (villain/accomplice) made me so mad with what they were doing, that I wanted to throttle them. The subject matter, stealing bone marrow and then ransoming it to the very patients desperately dependent upon it, sickened me. This wasn't an easy book to read. There were scenic repetitions and errors (spelling & grammatical) that caused the pacing of the book to falter in my opinion. Since this is the first book in a series, I would be willing to give another one a try in the hopes that the writing improves. Gina is a likeable character with a huge heart who often acts before thinking, but is lucky enough not to lose her job or her life by her rash actions. Hopefully time will lend maturity to her.
626 reviews10 followers
September 10, 2015
This was a fast pace book. Even though the reader knows whats happening the main character doesn't, so you are pulled in to how the character "Gina" works out what's going on with her patient behind the scene. Gina is portrayed as a smart, strong and an intelligent person with a mind of here own.

After reading the book, it made me really think about the things that could and do go wrong in hospitals that patients and family don't even know about. This is rather scary when you think about all the possibilities and scenarios that are played out each and every day in any hospital and we don't even have a clue....

But al in all it was a pretty good read.
Profile Image for Linda Rawlins.
Author 17 books173 followers
November 15, 2013
Medical Thriller about a couple who hold cancer patients hostage for treatment needed to keep them alive. Gina Mazzio, RN fights for her patients. After losing one of her favorite patients, she investigates to find the problem, despite the obstacles of her boyfriend, the hospital, the physician and the killer. Provides insight into the world of oncology and definitely not for the squeamish. Graphic depictions with some foul language. If you like edgy medical thrillers, you might like "Bone Dry."
Profile Image for Karen.
1,287 reviews
October 15, 2017
Imagine. You have cancer. You've been blasted and wasted with chemotherapy, along with every other poison the doctors could find to kill malignant cells. Most days you're more dead than alive. Now there is one last chance for survival. Tomorrow you will be infused with your own, treated bone marrow frozen, stored, and safe in one of California's most prestigious hospitals. Then comes the note: "We have your marrow.... pay or die."

An interesting twist to this medical series is a nurse if the focal point. How nice, for a change.
Profile Image for Babus Ahmed.
792 reviews61 followers
August 13, 2013
A riveting medical thriller which will have you on the edge of your seat. Fast-paced and suspenseful. When lab worker Faye is in an abusive relationship with the misogynistic Frankie Nellis, he ropes her into his scheme of extortion and murder. Gina Mazzio is the RN caring for a number of oncology patients who seem to be behaving strangely...

A gutsy thriller.
176 reviews1 follower
September 8, 2015
A good story

Bone Dry is a good story. I enjoyed reading it but wasn't swept up in the story. Enjoyed the parts about Vinnie's struggle to make it to his senior prom, for just one dance with his girlfriend best. Glad Gina solved the crimes and saved the other patients.
Readers who enjoy medical mysteries will enjoy "Bone Dry".
Profile Image for Loretta.
329 reviews
March 9, 2016
Good medical mystery. The reader knows who is stealing patient's bone marrow for ransom but the main character Gina, a nurse at the hospital does not. I liked Gina because she is strong willed, tough, and a determined advocate for her patients. An entertaining read as Gina attempts to figure out who is stealing the bone marrow before her patients die.

10 reviews
March 1, 2016
A little weak but fast moving

I got this as a free offer. I won't read anymore of the series. Lots of typos noted. The characters were not well developed and were predictable. The story was fast moving. I am surprised the author is a RN since there are some discrepancies I would not expect from a nurse. Overall, a fair read (especially since it was free).
Profile Image for Tony Peck.
580 reviews4 followers
December 1, 2016
I couldn't wait to finish this book. The hero is ok. She is tough, determined and intelligent. The story was quite exciting, although you know who the villains are from the beginning. I think that the main villain was so viscous and nasty and dumb, that it tainted everything else. Not a favorite for me.
Profile Image for Marina Spirova.
156 reviews16 followers
February 7, 2018
I can't say I loved it.

If it wasn't for the audio narration I would have probably never finished the book. It is a little ... predictable, unrealistic. I don't know, maybe it is just not my type of a read.
What I could definitely say is that I expected something way different.
Profile Image for Albert.
183 reviews4 followers
November 8, 2015
Nice, fun book about a nurse who can't help advocating for her patients and finds herself in trouble as a result. Addresses some interesting themes, including domestic violence and rather caricatured problems with hospital administration.

3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 stars.
Profile Image for Kim.
5 reviews7 followers
September 2, 2015
Entertaining but a lot of holes

Don't want to give any spoilers, but found myself thinking the main character would have called the police the instant she unraveled the mystery. A fun beach read though.
Profile Image for Kira MacKinnon.
67 reviews
October 11, 2015
The concept of the book is good. For me it was obvious what was going to happen. I also got irritated with the Faye character. I am not sure this author sold me on reading anymore in the series. Just didn't have the wow factor.
Profile Image for denise sykora.
5 reviews
April 1, 2016
Bone dry boring

If this is supposed to be a medical thriller, I was sorely disappointed since both the medical and thriller twists were lost in the drama of the personal relationships.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 126 reviews

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