Michael Connelly : why Blood Work ?

Here are a few explanations from the author about the way the idea of writing Blood work came into his mind.

Blood Work was inspired by a good friend of mine who had a heart transplant in 1993. I was aware from spending time with him how much his life had changed, how much he was relying on the medical machinery, and how he had to take fifty-two pills a day. The main thing, however, that inspired it was that after he got the new heart he started exhibiting many of the emotions that I saw years earlier when I was working on that plane-crash story and talking to the survivors. The thing that touched me so much about those survivors was their survivor guilt--their emotional upset at surviving a crash where many other people didn't and the happenstance of it. You know, like one person walks away without a scratch where the person in the seat next to them is killed. Though it's no fault of their own, it delivers a burden to them. My friend, Terry, who had the heart transplant, had the same thing happen to him. It took him a long time to work it out and to reach a point of acceptance. Of all the things that he was going through, that touched me the most and inspired me to write a story that had someone in his situation where he felt beholden to the person who provided his heart.