Medical Fiction

Twenty-one-month-old Cassie Jones is bright, energetic, the picture of health. Yet her parents rush her to the emergency room night after night with medical symptoms no doctor can explain. Cassie's parents seem sympathetic and deeply concerned. Her favorite nurse is a model of devotion. Yet when child psychologist Alex Delaware is called in to investigate, instinct tells him that one of them may be a monster.

Nineteen-year-old innocent Laura is becoming more productive as she transforms into a hucow, and she’s about to find out that nothing is off-limits as she satisfies all the Dominant Doctor's deviant urges—and her own.

Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother's disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman—especially a Black woman—can find herself on trial for witchcraft.

Newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital Noah Rothauser is swamped in his new position, from managing the surgical schedules to dealing with the fallouts from patient deaths. Known for its medical advances, the famed teaching hospital has fitted several ORs as "hybrid operating rooms of the future" - an improvement that seems positive until an anesthesia error during a routine procedure results in the death of an otherwise healthy man.

For the district nurses of Victory Walk, there's been little time to bask in the triumph of D-day as London is facing a new threat - the buzz bombs. Everyone is terrified, never knowing where the next one will strike. Into this tense atmosphere, new nurse Iris must make her mark. She’s had more experience of nursing than many, but since arriving in East London from the countryside, she has struggled to fit in with the other staff. Meanwhile, Alice is facing an agonising wait to hear if her boyfriend, Joe, has survived D-day.

When Dr. Kate Philo and her exploration team discover what appears to be a seal frozen in an Arctic iceberg, they believe they have made a momentous breakthrough in their research. Kate is part of the Lazarus Project, run by the egocentric genius Erastus Carthage. To date they have brought small creatures like plankton and shrimp "back to life" - for 1/10th of a creature’s natural lifespan. As the underwater excavation begins, Kate and her team realize it is not a seal they have found, but a man.

Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early 20s, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers - Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.

Veterinarian Samantha Lewis and her team are dedicated to providing a sanctuary for unwanted, abused, and abandoned dogs in New York City. But every day it gets harder to operate her no-kill shelter. Sam is already at her breaking point when she learns of an unidentified, dangerous virus spreading through their neighborhood. The medical community can determine only that animals are the carriers.

April Lavery has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a trail-blazer in the deeply conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional, as evidenced by her current boyfriend, a handsome and charismatic medical student from Nigeria.

Fans of Patrick Taylor's bestselling Irish Country novels know Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly as the irascible senior partner of a general practice in the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo. But there was a time, shortly after arriving in Ballybucklebo, that Dr. O'Reilly was not widely accepted by the villagers. This touching short story tells of how O'Reilly, with a little help, began to overcome their objections.

When Mark Shillingford commentates on a race in which his twin sister Clare, an accomplished and successful jockey, comes in third, he can't help but be suspicious. As a professional race-caller, he knows she should have won. Did she lose on purpose? Was the race fixed? Why on earth would she do something so out of character? That night, Mark confronts Clare with his suspicions, but she storms off after an explosive argument. It's the last time Mark sees her alive.

Meet Imelda and Augustine, or - as our young narrator calls his unusual parents - Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedies and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em's bipolar disorder seizes her she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others. This accomplished debut is graceful and urgent, with a one-of-a-kind voice that will stay with listeners long after the final moments.

We've all been there. One minute, you're sprawled out on your bed, minding our own business, and the next, you're lying in the back seat of your best friend's car as she races you to the ER. And not the closest one either. No. You're headed to the one 50 miles farther out, because the one five minutes away is where you start your residency next week. So there you are, lying in cubicle nine, hoping like hell that the doctor about to examine you isn't young, sexy, or male. Of course, he's all three.

My brother's best friend should have come with a warning label. The man was a cautionary tale and we were the ill-fated cliche. The star quarterback to my loner art geek. I fell, and I fell hard. A decade and a lifetime later, he's back. Only instead of being the star jock, he's now a surgeon. As if all that isn't bad enough, he has it in his determined, arrogant head that we should pick up where we left off. But this time, it'll take more than devouring looks and the rush of his touch to temp me back into his bed. And my heart? Not an option.

In Harvest, the book that introduced us to Tess Gerritsen's unique blend of medical expertise, harrowing suspense, and brilliantly crafted plot twists, the dark side of medical research is exposed. Harvest vividly portrays a young woman doctor challenging a world where medical miracles and greed fuel a lethal conspiracy - and the bright lights of the O.R. conceal the ultimate corruption of genius.

Dr. Julie Rees, a toxicologist and ER doctor, is stunned when her emergency room is flooded with teenagers from the same party, all on the verge of death. Julie knows the world of opioids inside and out, and she recognizes that there’s nothing typical about these cases. She suspects the teens took - or were given - fentanyl. But why did they succumb so quickly?

Trying to find some normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian Murphy and his family are on a summer excursion in Cape Cod when his wife, Emma, comes down with concerning flu-like symptoms. But their leisurely return home to New York City quickly becomes a race to the local hospital as she suddenly begins seizing in the car. At the ICU, she is diagnosed with eastern equine encephalitis, a rare and highly lethal mosquito-borne viral disease seemingly caught during one of their evening cookouts.

When an unidentified, seemingly healthy young woman collapses suddenly on the New York City subway and dies upon reaching the hospital, her case is an eerie reminder for veteran medical examiner Jack Stapleton of the 1918 flu pandemic. Fearful of a repeat on the 100th anniversary of the nightmarish contagion, Jack autopsies the woman within hours of her demise and discovers some striking anomalies: first, that she has had a heart transplant, and second, that, against all odds, her DNA matches that of the transplanted heart.

A series of suspicious deaths in a retirement home draws Nameless into the confidence of a terrified former resident - and into the dark heart of a shocking conspiracy. In part five of the Nameless series, it’s time to hunt. Oakshore Park is Michigan’s most exclusive assisted-living community. Presided over by two killer angels of mercy, it’s also THE go-to facility in assisted dying. For a cut, they make impatient heirs happy. Nameless must concoct a scheme just as cunning.

After fleeing Los Angeles during the last, desperate throes of the DRYP pandemic, medical resident Susan Barry and critically injured oil company executive Alan Wheeler know their toehold on survival in rural Liberty Valley won't last. They need food, fuel, and help. At first, they reach out to other survivors by radio, but when a mysterious code starts, the other survival colonies disappear from the air one by one.