Barnes & Noble Discover Great New WritersBringing Out the Dead is a loving elegy to the souls and saints of Hell's Kitchen by first-time novelist Joe Connelly, a former EMS paramedic who spent nine years working the streets of Manhattan's West Side. This is not Disney's Times Square: Through Connelly's narrative we witness a gangster run over by one of his own garbage trucks, a teenager who gives birth without having known she was pregnant, a heroin dealer who falls two stories and is impaled—alive—on an iron spike, and a tough gangbanger who becomes poignantly childlike as he bleeds to death on the sidewalk. In scenes like these and more, Connelly has compiled a record of everyday life during wartime and presented it in a quietly observant manner that reveals all without passing judgment. A novel full of clearly autobiographical references, Bringing Out the Dead details the events of two days and nights in the life of Frank Pierce, a graveyard-shift paramedic haunted by the ghosts of his failures and sinking ever deeper into alcoholism. He wants to quit because his nightly patrols in his home neighborhood increasingly replay memories of rescues gone wrong: "The ghosts of my dreams had followed me out to the street and were now talking back." Yet the ghosts are addictive. Every night he sees Rose, an asthmatic girl he could not incubate quickly enough to save. She passes Frank's ambulance and winks "with those same eyes that stared at [him] so blankly a month before." And there is Mr. Burke, an elderly man whom Frank temporarily revived to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "September of My Years" ("not a good rhythmfor CPR, but what music to leave with!"), who appears on a street corner and whispers to Frank, "I lived for something and died for nothing." The whiskey in Frank's 3am java jolt does nothing to banish his ghostly visitors. The ghosts are powerful reminders of the limits of Frank's lifesaving ability. After