Excerpt from Mercies in Disguise by Gina Kolata, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By that time Bill was near death, in the hospital with pneumonia. They sent the skin sample to the pathology department at MUSC. And they waited.

Weeks went by. Tim asked the pathologists if they had any results. They did not. Then Buddy called to ask. "We don't know where the biopsy is," the pathologists finally admitted to the brothers. "We don't know what happened to the skin."

Nine years later, the university sent Tim a letter saying it had been found behind a storage cabinet and asking what he wanted them to do with it. By then, it was too late. Even if they had wanted to analyze the skin it would have deteriorated beyond repair.

"I remember his daddy walking through the plant. He had to hang on to the machines." The woman's words from the funeral haunted Tim. He thought of his own father — lurching through rooms, grabbing onto his sons for balance — before he died. He had to consider the possibility that whatever had killed his father wasn't unique. His dad had lasted to the respectable age of 73, but his grandfather had only been 49 when he died. Could it have been the same disease? It certainly sounded like it.

He thought of his three brothers, Buddy, Billy, and Mike. Were they all destined to die like their father? And what about their children? If it could pass from father to son — the way traits like the famous Baxley nose and the mouth with that Cupid's bow had been replicated from generation to generation — what might that mean, exactly? Was this written into his genes too?

From Mercies in Disguise by Gina Kolata. Copyright © 2017 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press.