New Novel Inspired by True Events
The Name Richard Angelo May Ring a Bell — and a New Novel Brings His Story Back to Life
TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. — If you grew up in New York or on Long Island, you may remember the name. Richard Angelo. The nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip who was always first through the door when a patient’s heart stopped. The one everyone trusted. The one no one suspected — until they did.
Now, nearly four decades after Angelo’s 1989 murder conviction shocked the region, a Tarpon Springs publisher is bringing that story back — this time as the inspiration for a debut psychological thriller that is drawing early attention from readers across the Gulf Coast and beyond.
Harbor Light Press, an imprint of Tarpon Springs–based All Star Press, has released The Angel of Death by debut novelist Jack Brennan — a taut, psychologically driven thriller that reimagines the Angelo case through entirely fictional characters, exploring the terrifying inner logic of a caregiver who harms patients in order to save them.
A Case the Nation May Never Forgot
For many New Yorkers, the Richard Angelo case is a piece of lived memory, not history.
Angelo, a registered nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital on Long Island, was found to have injected patients with Pavulon and other paralytic drugs, inducing emergencies so he could respond to them as the hero. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1989 and sentenced to 61 years in prison. The case predated the internet era, spreading through newspapers and local television in a way that embedded itself in the regional consciousness of New York — especially on Long Island, where Good Samaritan was a community hospital that served ordinary families.
“I’ve had people here in Florida tell me they remember exactly where they were when they heard about it,” said a spokesperson for Harbor Light Press. “That’s how deeply it landed — and that connection doesn’t disappear just because someone moved south.”
The Novel – A Medical Thriller
The Angel of Death follows Ricardo, a night-shift nurse at a Long Island hospital whose colleagues regard him as indispensable. In seven months on the overnight floor, he has responded to thirty-seven code blue emergencies. What no one knows is that one nurse caused most of them.
The story is told through multiple perspectives: a detective who notices a statistical pattern the hospital would rather ignore; a fellow nurse who glimpses something in a colleague’s eyes she cannot explain; and a retired longshoreman in Bay Shore who remembers a night his fingers went numb, and the face of the man standing over his IV line in the dark.
Brennan, who grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, has personal ties to the original case: a family member served on the jury during Angelo’s 1989 trial at the Suffolk County Courthouse in Riverhead. He spent years researching the case before fictionalizing it.
“I didn’t want to write true crime,” Brennan said. “I wanted to understand what it feels like to be inside a mind like that — and what it costs the people close enough to sense the truth but not yet able to name it. That’s the novel.”
The book is available now in paperback, Audible and Kindle editions on Amazon and through major online retailers. Tampa Bay–area readers are encouraged to request it at local independent bookstores.
About Harbor Light Press / All Star Press
Harbor Light Press is an imprint of All Star Press, an independent book publisher headquartered in Tarpon Springs, Florida. The press publishes compelling, character-driven fiction and nonfiction for readers across the Gulf Coast and nationally.
