A full-throttle thriller and a powerful human drama of wounded love--and the hurts that afflict the body, mind, and spirit It was truly a crime against innocents. Eleven dolphins, part of an experiment in healing, are found slaughtered in their saltwater tanks. When Thorn, a Florida renegade who has lived a life of fierce freedom, investigates, he triggers a vicious attack that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, plagued by unrelenting pain. Now Thorn is starting over in a wheelchair, bitter enough to drive his lover away, desperate enough to seek miracles on the fringes of medical science--where his childhood friend, now a doctor, is doing cutting-edge research in a quest for the ultimate painkiller. Bean Wilson was once destined for greatness. Then came the war in Vietnam, a debilitating injury, and a simmering rage. Now Bean is running a pain-relief clinic in Key West, assisted by a beautiful six-foot-tall island girl named Pepper Tremaine, who chews hot chilies like gum and carries a scalpel in her blouse. Under the guise of a respectable research facility, Bean and Pepper are using human beings as lab rats, then feeding the bodies of their failures to the shark-churned sea. Within hours of entering the clinic, Thorn can sense the danger. But when he makes the bizarre connection between eleven dead dolphins and Bean's clinic, the stakes are raised. Because this mad, ruthless doctor may be on the brink of the most dangerous discovery of all.