A journalist with a weakness for bending the facts uncovers a story about a medical breakthrough so astonishing it needs no embellishment--but behind the game-changing science, something darker lies. Whitney Chace is a staff writer for the prestigious New York news magazine The Bystander. A respected byline in the magazine's culture p., Whitney grapples with an irresistible urge to enhance her coverage with intriguing, highly plausible untruths and nigh-undetectable white lies. She calls this compulsion "the creep"--an overpowering need to improve the story in the telling. And she has a particular genius for getting away with it. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Whitney yearns to transition from profiling rock stars and interviewing over-hyped novelists to covering the stories that "really matter." When a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with a potentially massive story about a game-changing medical discovery, Whitney thinks she has finally found a hard news story that doesn't need to be enhanced. Eva Kriss, the brilliant and charismatic young doctor behind the breakthrough, claims to have discovered "the Holy Grail of medical science": an artificial blood substitute that, if viable, promises to save millions of lives and make Dr. Kriss and her Big-Pharma backers rich beyond measure. But is Dr. Kriss's blood substitute the altruistic medical miracle she claims it is, or part of a pitiless conspiracy to push the drug through FDA approval at any cost? Set against the backdrop of the ramp-up to the Iraq War and the decline of print journalism, Michael LaPointe's infectious and ingeniously plotted debut paints an affecting portrait of an increasingly unequal twenty-first century, exploring how deceitfulness, evasion, self-enhancement and overt, confidently delivered lies can be transfused into fact and constitute a broader violence against the social fabric and public trust.