Medical Thrillers Fiction

Anthony Spencer is egotistical, proud of being a self-made business success at the peak of his game, even though the cost of winning was painfully high. A cerebral hemorrhage leaves Tony comatose in a hospital ICU. He 'awakens' to find himself in a surreal world, a 'living' landscape that mirrors dimensions of his earthly life, from the beautiful to the corrupt.

Following the post mortem of a stowaway that reveals neither cause of death nor identity, Dr. Kay Scarpetta travels to Paris in search of information. In Paris she is given a secret mission--one that could ruin her career.

Anna Ogilvy was a budding twenty-five-year-old writer with a bright future. Then, one night, she stabbed two people to death with no apparent motive—and she hasn’t woken up since. Dubbed “Sleeping Beauty” by the tabloids, Anna suffers from a rare psychosomatic disorder known to neurologists as “resignation syndrome.” Dr. Benedict Prince is a forensic psychologist and an expert in the field of sleep-related homicides. His methods represent the last possible hope of solving the infamous “Anna O” case by waking Anna up so she can stand trial.

In the tightly knit world of Boston medicine, the Randall family reigns supreme. When heart surgeon J. D. Randall’s teenage daughter dies during a botched abortion, the medical community threatens to explode. Was it malpractice? A violation of the Hippocratic Oath? Or was Karen Randall murdered in cold blood? The natural suspect is Arthur Lee, a brilliant surgeon and known abortionist, who has been carrying out the illegal procedure with the help of pathologist John Berry.

Richard Parnell is one of the leading minds in gene therapy research, and he expects the job at Dubette, Inc., to be his first step to a Nobel Prize. But when he arrives at the American pharmaceutical giant, he finds himself shut out of the main avenues of research, isolated from the cutting edge in a way he has never been before.

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.

For the second time in his short life, Teddy Clock has survived a massacre. Two years ago, he barely escaped when his entire family was slaughtered. Now, at 14, in a hideous echo of the past, Teddy is the lone survivor of his foster family’s mass murder. Orphaned once more, the traumatized teenager has nowhere to turn - until the Boston PD puts Detective Jane Rizzoli on the case. Determined to protect this young man, Jane discovers that what seemed like a coincidence is one part of a killer’s mission.

Ben Dafoe, emergency-room doctor and part-time crime-scene consultant, is haunted by addiction. Two years before, a cocaine habit claimed the life of his identical twin, Aaron. Now Ben walks onto the scene of a savage stabbing to learn that the victim, Emily Kenmore, is his former fiancée, another loved one who fell prey to addiction. One the wall in Emily's bedroom is a streak of blood that belongs to the killer. When the DNA from that sample matches Ben's blood, he becomes the prime suspect.

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.

After the deranged lunatic who murdered Sarah Durandt’s husband and son is executed, Sarah returns to her home in the Adirondacks in hopes of achieving some measure of closure. But once there, Sarah is forced to face a nightmarish possibility. The wrong man may have been sent to his death, and the killer of her loved ones may be hunting for a new victim.

After an exchange student with bubonic plague turns up in a Reno hospital, a contractor with identical symptoms dies in Los Angeles. The government‘s official stance is that the cases are isolated and the outbreak is under control. But George Mack, a 30-year public health veteran, quickly realizes this is no ordinary plague. The death toll is too high, and the spread pattern make no sense. As Reno’s hospitals fill with victims, Mack begins to believe that there is more to the epidemic than the CDC is letting on - and that he must take drastic steps if he hopes to save his city.

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire: Healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her - and learns of some troubling parallels to her own life.

Something terrible has happened in the snowbound village of Kingdom Come, Wyoming, where 12 eerily identical houses stand dark and abandoned. Meals remain untouched on dining room tables, cars are still in garages, and the town's residents have vanished into thin air. This is the disturbing setting where vacationing medical examiner Maura Isles and her traveling companions find themselves trapped during a ferocious snowstorm.

The Chinese police have once more been forced to enlist the services of American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell, this time to investigate a series of four horrific ritual executions in Beijing. Detective Li Yan is determined to discover just how one of the victims in particular, an American diplomat, became caught up in the slaying. And he is arguably even more determined to have nothing to do with Campbell, whom he finds simultaneously too foreign and too... familiar. The personal polarity that once attracted Yan and Campbell again strengthens their professional partnership.

Boston Detective Jane Rizzoli is on the case of a big game hunter found dead in his apartment, alone with the body of a beautiful white snow leopard he had recently been commissioned to procure and stuff for a high-profile museum in the area. Medical examiner Maura Isles connects the case to a number of seemingly unrelated deaths where the victims have all been found hanging upside down, the hallmark of a leopard's kill.

Eve Duncan became a forensic sculptor after the disappearance of her daughter Bonnie, whose remains were discovered...yet unrecognizable. Driven by a need to liberate innocence from the shroud of death, she obsesses over recreating the likenesses of faceless, decomposed murder victims, using only their bare skulls as a guide.

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.

It’s the kind of case that chills Caitlyn to the bone. Missing person. College student. Beloved daughter of a world leader in biotechnology. She was last seen on a spring break cruise. No witnesses. No motives. Just one possible lead - reports of a stranger who may have lured the young archeology major off the ship and into the jungles of Guatemala. When Caitlyn follows her hunch into the jungle - with the FBI’s Jake Carver by her side - the trail takes a surprising turn into the very heart of darkness.

Since the dawn of civilization, it's been mankind's greatest dream: immortality and eternal youth. Dramatic advances in medical science have finally made it possible. But in order to preserve everyone's youthful state, they must undergo an irreversible operation before passing into adulthood. A special hormone patch maintains each person's body in the form of a preadolescent 11-year-old.

Convicted serial killer Carrie Grethen has escaped from a psychiatric hospital with plans for revenge. Wary and shaken, Scarpetta also has to investigate the death by fire of an unknown woman. The post mortem reveals that the woman was stabbed before the fire was started, and soon Scarpetta and her colleagues are called out to the scene of another fire and another murder.