Healer — Carol Cassella

Claire Boehning's medical career is just about to blossom when her brilliant husband, Addison, makes a breakthrough medical discovery. His biotech start-up strikes gold, and their family is catapulted into a life of luxury. Claire eventually drifts from medicine and decides to leave her promising career behind to be a stay-at-home mother. However, a risky gamble on a new cancer drug soon sends the couple into irreparable debt, and now they must move their family to a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Hallum, Washington. Claire must go back to work, but her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health clinic. There, she gets more than a second chance at medicine when she meets Miguela, a Nicaraguan refugee on a secret quest to find the family she has lost. As their friendship develops, a new mystery unfolds that threatens to destroy Claire's family and forces her to question what it truly means to heal. Healer exposes the vulnerabilities of the American family, provoking questions of choice versus fate, desire versus need, and the duplicitous power of money.