Consider the Alternative — Irene Marcuse

MERCY...OR MURDER

On the first day of her new job, assisting the elderly at an Upper West Side housing complex, social worker Anita Servi arrives to find her boss, Susan Wu, dead in her office. A plastic bag is tied around her head and a copy of the Hemlock Society's Final Exit lies nearby. Why such a young and vital woman would take her own life is a mystery. But when Anita discovers three other suicides were committed using the recommendations found in Final Exit, she wonders if these suicides are "assisted" in a much more sinister way.

Anita begins to snoop into the backgrounds of the deceased, and quickly finds some disturbing links. Soon she's traveling down several interconnected roads of murder, mercy and money-lots of it. And it's the less altruistic motives that may just place her among those who have passed on, more quickly than she ever imagined.