Medical Mysteries Fiction

Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father of a child with autism, finds himself drawn into the controversy over the apparent but rarely acknowledged connection between childhood vaccines and autism. His quest to uncover the truth forces him to risk all he holds dear while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past. Even while holding down his job and dealing with family crises, Colletti spearheads the drive to contend with industrial espionage, Russian gangsters, and sexual predators.

Dr. Temperance Brennan, Forensic Anthropologist for the Province of Quebec, digs for a corpse where Sister Elisabeth Nicolet, dead for over a century and now a candidate for sainthood, should be lying in her grave. A strange, small coffin, buried in the recesses of a decaying church, holds the first clue to the cloistered nun's fate. The puzzle surrounding Sister Elisabeth Nicolet's life and death provides a welcome contrast to discoveries at a burning chalet, where scorched and twisted bodies await Tempe's professional expertise.

The entire human race balances on the razor's edge of annihilation, beset by an enemy that turns our own bodies against us, that changes normal people into psychopaths or transforms them into nightmares. To some, Doctor Margaret Montoya is a hero-a brilliant scientist who saved the human race from an alien intelligence determined to exterminate all of humanity. To others, she's a monster - a mass murderer single-handedly responsible for the worst atrocity ever to take place on American soil. All Margaret knows is that she's broken. The blood of a million deaths is on her hands.

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America - where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain - the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences.

Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems, and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn. Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.

When her phone rang, Diane Macklin wondered what her sister wanted now. Then she heard that their mother was in the emergency room with a heart problem. The doctor tending to her mother was Dr. Joe Adams, who was far from Diane’s idea of the family doctor. He had been alone since his first wife had died, and was apparently heaven-sent as a mate for Diane, if she could only get past the trauma of her previous near-miss at the altar. The heart problem was hard to solve initially, but the subsequent difficulty turned out to be murder, and affected the lives of both Diane and Joe.

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But in the coronary care unit at one of Copenhagen’s leading medical centers, a nurse fills a syringe with an overdose of heart medication and stealthily enters the room of an older male patient. Six days earlier, a paperboy on his route in central Copenhagen stumbles upon a macabre find: the naked body of a dead woman, lying in a fountain with arms marked with small incisions. Cause of death? Exsanguination - the draining of all the blood in her body.

If the biblical plagues of Egypt truly happened—could they happen again—on a global scale? Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, Professor Harold McCabe comes stumbling out of the sands, but he dies before he can tell his story. Then an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone had begun to mummify the professor's body—while he was still alive. Subsequently, the medical team who had performed the man's autopsy has fallen ill with an unknown disease. Fearing the worst, a colleague of the professor reaches out to Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force. The call is urgent, for Professor McCabe had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses.

Dr. Rhea Lynch is deputized as special assistant deputy coroner when the full-time coroner is shot. The shooter, a young man, claims that his sister has been abducted; Rhea believes him and attempts to help find the truth. A bizarre chain of events follows that embroils the doctor in a mystery that puts her own life at risk.

For more than 13 years, special agent Winter Black has believed her little brother was dead - kidnapped and murdered by The Preacher, the same lunatic who killed her parents. A lead into Justin’s whereabouts brings her out of her hiatus to chase it, but other cases need her attention, too. At the FBI, tensions are high when a body is dug up, encased in a 55-gallon drum. The team soon realizes they aren’t hunting the typical serial killer, but a skilled surgeon.

From New York Times best-selling author Mira Grant comes the second book in the terrifying Parasitology series. The SymboGen-designed tapeworms were created to relieve humanity of disease and sickness. But the implants in the majority of the world's population began attacking their hosts, turning them into a ravenous horde. Now those who do not appear to be afflicted are being gathered for quarantine as panic spreads, but Sal and her companions must discover how the tapeworms are taking over their hosts, what their eventual goal is, and how they can be stopped.

Former star basketball player Clay Edison is busy. He’s solved a decades-old crime and redeemed an innocent man, earning himself a suspension in the process. Things are getting serious with his girlfriend. Plus his brother’s fresh out of prison, bringing with him a whole new set of complications. Then the phone rings in the dead of night. A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots. Chaos. For Clay and his fellow coroners, it’s the start of a long night and the first of many to come.

A woman checks into a hotel room and entertains a man who is not her husband. A shooter blows away the lover and wounds the millionairess, leaving her for dead. Is it the perfect case for the Women's Murder Club - or just the most twisted?

Dr. Lauren Hale, a new hospital resident, is nearly killed by a raving mad emergency room patient, in a senseless, unprovoked attack. Officer David Olson, veteran cop and former Marine, returns from a father-son camping trip to discover that his ex-wife has vanished under bizarre circumstances, and his police department is on the verge of collapse. Jack and Emma Harper, a young, upwardly mobile couple, find their hip city neighborhood rapidly descending into madness.

After their last wild adventure, the Flock members are taken under the wing of an FBI agent and try to live "normal" lives by going to school, making friends - and continuing their relentless search for their parents. But the Erasers return, forcing the Flock to abandon their search and make their escape once again. The voice inside Max's head keeps telling her that it's up to her to save the world, but this is especially challenging to do when she is faced with her ultimate match: a newer and better version of herself, Maximum Ride II.

When a bout of food poisoning strikes a residence for lively seniors blessed with generous pensions and high-ranking political connections, Dr. Zol Szabo, public health doctor turned medical detective, assembles his investigative team. But the epidemic’s source proves elusive; the death count rises and when the scourge threatens someone close to Zol, he calls in his friend and colleague Hamish Wakefield, a microbe connoisseur with a nose for exotic diagnoses.

Twenty-eight-year-old Sean McGillin is the picture of health, until he fractures his leg while in-line skating in New York City's Central Park. Within 24 hours of his surgery, he dies.

It's New Year's Eve, the final night of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, and another poor soul has turned up dead. Ted Eddings, a scuba diver and investigative reporter who was a favorite at the medical examiner's office, is found 30 feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for the state of Virginia, can't help but wonder why she received a phone call from someone reporting the death before the police were notified.

Wounded in the line of duty, NYPD homicide cop John Corey is convalescing in rural eastern Long Island when an attractive young couple he knows is found shot to death on the family patio. The victims were biologists at Plum Island, a research site rumored to be an incubator for germ warfare. Suddenly, a local double murder takes on shattering global implications - and thrusts Corey and two extraordinary women into a dangerous search for the secret of Plum Island....