The Last Shift

"Hour thirty, and counting."

Dr. Owen Vance has been awake for thirty hours. He is fuelled by black coffee and pure spite. He has just watched a man arrive in his ICU after a catastrophic accident - unknown, unnamed, nobody waiting for him, a chart that reads simply: John Doe.

Owen is brilliant, exhausted, and very funny about both. He becomes obsessed with the case. He argues with administrators, trades razor-sharp banter with his charge nurse Clara, falls asleep in a supply closet and gets reported missing, and wages a prank war with the orthopaedic surgeons that will go down in Saint Agatha's Memorial history.

But something does not add up. There are gaps in his memory he cannot account for. Questions about this stranger that pull at him with an urgency he cannot explain and cannot put down. A sense - irrational, bone-deep, persistent - that whatever is happening to John Doe is somehow the most important thing Owen has ever been asked to solve.

THE LAST SHIFT is a novel about medicine and exhaustion, about the people who keep us alive and what it costs them, about the things a mind will do when it refuses to go dark. It is furiously funny and genuinely devastating, built around a single discovery that reframes everything that came before it - the kind that makes you close the book, sit very still, and then go back to the beginning.

"He never stopped working. Not even in there."

- Clara Ndolo, Charge Nurse, Bay 4