Painkiller — Steven Spruill

Dr. Sharon Francis is a young resident at Adams Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., where her mother is a schizophrenic patient. Sharon's mother has this crazy fear that other patients on the psychiatric ward are being persuaded to sign themselves out and are then being kidnapped. To pacify her mother, Dr. Francis checks on one of these "disappeared" patients. Then one of her own patients is missing, and she begins some serious investigating.

Once Sharon starts asking questions around the hospital, accidents begin happening to her. First someone tries to run her down as she bicycles home; then she is attacked, but escapes; finally she is knocked out and drugged, and finds herself a patient in the mental ward under the care of the hated Dr. Valois, who is sure Sharon has finally succumbed to schizophrenia, too.

Neither Mark Pendleton, handsome policeman and son of one of Adms Memorial's most respected doctors, nor Jeff Harrod, the charming young resident in love with her, are able to persuade Dr. Valois that Sharon is not delusional.

A harrowing escape from the hospital proves futile when Sharon and her mother are captured by an evil genius and the instruments of healing become the instruments of torture.