The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

A New York Times bestseller in the tradition of In Cold Blood, THE GOOD NURSE provides a page-turning read with the pacing of a thriller and the literary depth of a novel. It does more than chronicle serial killing RN Charles Cullen's life and deadly career, and the breathless efforts of two homicide detectives and Cullen's best friend to stop him; it also paints an incredibly vivid portrait of friendship and betrayal, as well as a penetrating expose inside the corporate boardrooms of America's private hospitals. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at hospitals and the people who work in them, in a shocking new way.***Serial killer RN Charlie Cullen wouldn't speak to the media, but they quickly dubbed him "The Angel of Death". But Cullen was neither a mercy killer, nor a simple monster. He was a favorite son, a husband and father, a best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 400 patients, Charles Cullen is also the most prolific serial killer in American history.
Now, in a riveting piece of literary investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, award winning journalist Charles Graeber presents an exclusive and terrifying tale of murder, friendship and betrayal, based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as years of exclusive jailhouse conversations with both Cullen and the confidential informant who helped bring him down.Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Amazingly, Cullen was repeatedly fired or allowed to quit, but always managed to keep good references and find new work, and victims. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Cullen will spend the rest of his life in prison; the administrators who passed him from hospital to hospital for 16 years got raises and promotions. Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.