Medical Thrillers Fiction

A well-known scientist, who has recently discovered an effective vaccine for cocaine addiction, dies from anaphylaxis after a routine injection in the office of his allergist, Dr. Leonard Haberman. A malpractice lawsuit ensues, fanned by a politically ambitious senator. Questions arise when it is discovered that the cocaine vaccine specifications are missing along with the head technician who worked closely with the deceased scientist. CBI Agent Ben Locke connects these events with a cold case involving the mysterious death of another scientist.

Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-'90s New York. It is a ground's-eye view of life on the streets: the shoot-outs, the bad cops, the unhinged medics, the hopeless patients, the dark humor in bizarre circumstances, and one medic's struggle to balance his desire to help against his own growing callousness. This story features lives that hang in the balance, including a single job with a misdiagnosed newborn that sends Cross and his partner into a life-changing struggle between good and evil.

Milan, Italy, today. It is the most serious crisis that the world has ever faced. Bewildered, young and old, believers and atheists are asking all the same distressing questions: What will they do now that the greatest dream of humanity has turned into a nightmare? What will happen when the countdown clock winds to zero?

Dr. Mallory Hayes, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) medical investigator, is a committed physician and researcher quietly battling height and air-flight anxiety. When a tsunami devastates the coast of Southern California, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) establishes a camp to house the tens of thousands of people displaced by the disaster, and the Army is brought in to provide medical services.

Eleven years ago, the Co-ed Slayer murdered nine female students on the Oregon State University campus. Lacey Campbell barely escaped his attack, but lost her best friend whose remains were never found. As the sole surviving victim, Lacey helped send the sadistic serial killer to prison for life. Now a forensic odontologist examining teeth and bones for the state Medical Examiner, Lacey is devastated when she arrives at a crime scene and identifies the skeletal remains as her college friend’s.

There’s a body crushed under a load of pipes on a San Francisco construction site, and medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska is on call. So it’s her job to figure out who it is - and her headache when the autopsy reveals that the death is a homicide staged as an accident. Jessie is hot on the murderer’s trail, then an earthquake sends her and her whole city reeling. When the dust clears, her case has fallen apart and an innocent man is being framed. Jessie knows she’s the only one who can prove it, and she races to piece together the truth.

Pia Grazdani, the embattled medical student from Death Benefit, decides to take a year off from her medical studies and escape New York City. Intrigued by the promise of the burgeoning field of medical technology and the chance to clear her head, Pia takes a job at Nano, LLC, a lavishly funded, security-conscious nanotechnology insititute in the picturesque foothills of the Rockies. But the corporate campus is a place of secrets.

When a beautiful, red haired nurse’s body is found mutilated in her house in Lawley the morning after a date with Detective Constable Ryan Downey, all eyes turn to him. With a very specific modus operandi, Detective Sergeant Jenna Morgan and her team know exactly who the offender is; the trouble is he’s currently serving a life stretch in HMP Long Lartin. It soon becomes evident to DS Morgan and her team that there may be a copycat killer on the loose.

A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent family hostage at gunpoint, killing one and causing a massive standoff. A plume of radiation above New York City leads to a warehouse where, it seems, a powerful nuclear bomb was assembled just hours before. Sifting through the evidence, authorities determine that the unthinkable is about to happen: in ten days, a major American city will be vaporized by a terrorist attack.

Jeanette Garland, missing Castleford, July 1969. Susan Ridyard, missing Rochdale, March 1972. Claire Kemplay, missing Morley, since yesterday. It’s winter, 1974, Yorkshire, Christmas bombs, Lord Lucan on the run, the Bay City Rollers, and Eddie Dunford’s got the job he wanted – crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post. He didn’t know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan’s wings stitched into her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.

It’s never easy working fire scenes, Tempe thinks. Called to Washington, DC to analyze the victims of a building set ablaze amid mysterious circumstances, she sees all her misgivings justified. The building site is in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood with a colorful past and present, and the property’s ownership becomes even more suspicious when Tempe delves into its past. The pieces start falling into place strangely and quickly, and, sensing a good story, Tempe teams with a new ally, telejournalist Ivy Doyle.

En route to Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan receives a call from the Charleston coroner. During the storm, a medical waste container has washed up on the beach. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire. Chillingly, Tempe recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec 15 earlier.

Senator Ashley Butler is a quintessential Southern demagogue whose support of traditional American values includes a knee-jerk reaction against virtually all biotechnologies. When he's called to chair a subcommittee introducing legislation to ban new cloning technology, the senator views his political future in bold relief; and Dr. Daniel Lowell, inventor of the technique that will take stem cell research to the next level, sees a roadblock positioned before his biotech startup.

When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation. As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life - until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples.

Before my world came crashing down, I had it all. The successful career I dreamed of. The beautiful red-brick home where I could relax in front of the fire. The handsome, devoted husband whose blue eyes and charming smile always made me feel safe. As I call time of death, my voice is steady. My colleagues stand hushed around me, their eyes on me, confused, concerned.

Dr. Jacey Flanigan has worked tirelessly to achieve her dream of becoming a pediatric cardiologist. But when she moves to Manhattan to begin her career at a prestigious children's hospital, she discovers that the medical profession may not be what she expected. An encounter with an arrogant heart surgeon on her first day sets the tone for what's to come - a world of enigmatic physician behavior and questionable cardiac surgical practices cloaked in secrecy.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning - except the weather is perfectly clear, with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie.

Emma Watson, a brilliant research physician, has been training for years for the mission of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. Jack McCallum, Emma's estranged husband, has shared her dream of space travel, but a medical condition has grounded and embittered him. He must watch from the sidelines as his wife prepares for her first mission to the international Space Station.

It’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s birthday, and she’s about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is this a kids’ game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted? Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there’s been a homicide five minutes away.

A lethal pathogen appears on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Dr. Samantha Bower of the Centers for Disease Control is handed the case and asked to investigate its origins and containment. Samantha discovers a lethal pathogen unlike any she has encountered in her lifetime. Extremely contagious with a mortality rate higher than any disease ever recorded, it is an extinction level event. A man with an intimate knowledge of the microorganism offers her help. But Samantha Bower begins to suspect he is not who he says he is.