Medical Thrillers Fiction

Detective Jo Shaw has it all worked out. She’s good at her job, she has loads of mates, and she likes being single. She doesn’t need complications, but an emergency call to the stabbing of a young woman brings plenty of those. Jo has to risk her career to save the woman’s life, and a bad night gets worse when the trauma surgeon turns out to be Isla Munro, Jo’s only real love, who walked out on her 15 years ago and never came back.

Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are plagued by what seems like a completely senseless murder. Sofia Suarez, a widow and nurse who was universally liked by all her neighbors, lies bludgeoned to death in her own home. But anything can happen behind closed doors, and Sofia seemed to have plenty of secrets in her last days, making covert phone calls to old contacts and traceless burner phones. When Jane finally makes a connection between Sofia and the victim of a hit-and-run months earlier, the case only grows more blurry.

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.

The only three females in a group of new residents, the women quickly become roommates and friends, face long hours, a frenetic work pace, and unwanted advances from male colleagues. One becomes involved in unsavory underworld activities, another employs questionable medical skills that are overlooked by the male administrators who value her other services, and another tries to forget a lost love.

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?

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.

The fourth and Final Instalment in the Red Riding Quartet. With Nineteen Eighty Three, David Peace completes the Red Riding Quartet, an astonishing, sustained epic. Three intertwining storylines see the Quartet’s central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head.

Returning to practice after a suspension for stealing opioids, a young doctor takes the only job he can find: a post as a physician at the struggling St. Luke's Hospital in east London. Amid the maelstrom of sick patients, overworked staff and underfunded wards, a more insidious secret soon declares itself: too many patients are dying. And a murderer may be lurking in plain sight.

The End of Miracles is a twisting, haunting story about the drastic consequences of a frustrated obsession. A woman with a complex past wants nothing more than to become a mother, but struggles with infertility and miscarriage. She is temporarily comforted by a wish-fulfilling false pregnancy, but when reality inevitably dashes that fantasy, she falls into a depression so deep she must be hospitalized.

In this science fiction thriller, brothers are pitted against each other as a pandemic threatens to destabilize world governments by exerting a subtle mind control over survivors. Neil Johns has just started his dream job as a code breaker for the NSA when his brother Paul, a mycologist, goes missing on a trip to collect samples in the Amazon jungle. Paul returns with a gap in his memory and a fungal infection that almost kills him. But once he recuperates, he has enhanced communication, memory, and pattern recognition.

Scholar Richard Sabyn, a particularly obnoxious fellow, was believed to have been struck by lightning. However, Master Wycliffe believes otherwise and calls upon Sir Hugh de Singleton for help. Sir Hugh shares Wycliffe’s suspicions and launches a private investigation, learning that it might indeed be possible to make it look as though a man has died from a lightning strike. But who would go to all that effort, and why?

Six months have passed since the first murder investigation Detective Reed Mattox and his K-9 partner worked together, finding them in the throes of a steamy Midwestern summer, dealing with the usual increase in low-level crime that the hottest months tend to bring, when something unexpected happens. A body is found, and then another, and soon Reed and Billie are on the trail of a potential serial killer whose only pattern for his crimes seems to be no pattern at all. Battling against the heat and the clock, the K-9 team must sort through the crimes to identify a common thread that ties them all together. If they can, they may be able to stop the murders.

As a 911 dispatcher, Dana Newell takes pride in being calm in tough circumstances. In addition to her emotionally-charged career, she’s faced enough emergencies in her own life. She recently escaped her abusive fiancé to move to tranquil Rock Harbor where she hopes life will be more peaceful. But the idyllic town hides more danger and secrets than it first appeared. Dana is continually drawn to her new friend Boone, who has scars inside and out.

Liza Larkin, a recent med-school graduate on the cusp of her pathology internship, isn’t like most people. She would rather study the human brain or pound the heavy bag at the gym than spend time with others, and as an outsider she doesn’t let societal norms confine her. So when a stranger’s picture sends Liza’s schizophrenic mother deeper into psychosis, Liza does a reverse-image search to identify him. Upon discovering he is a trauma surgeon at a Massachusetts teaching hospital, she impulsively changes her pathology residency program of choice to his center.

If you thought fiction couldn't get darker then think again. Nineteen Seventy Seven, the second instalment of the Red Riding Quartet, is one long nightmare.Its heroes - the half decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead - would be considered villains in most people's books.

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.

Heather Lawrence’s long-awaited vacation to Salzburg wasn’t supposed to go like this. Mere hours into the transatlantic flight, the Houston FBI agent is awakened when passengers begin exhibiting horrific symptoms of an unknown infection. As the virus quickly spreads and dozens of passengers fall ill, Heather fears she’s witnessing an epidemic similar to ones her estranged husband studies for a living - but this airborne contagion may have been deliberately released.

Stacy Richardson is a microbiology graduate student at the University of Southern California, taking her final doctoral exams. In the middle of her "Quals," Stacy learns that her husband, head of the university's Microbiology Department, has "committed suicide" while on sabbatical at a super-secret bio-weapons lab known as the Devil's Workshop. Meanwhile, two train-riding hobos, "Lucky" Cunningham and "Hollywood Mike", are traveling near Vanished Lake, Texas, where the newest generation of bio-weapons is secretly being tested. A bio-accident at Vanishing Lake turns the town into a living hell.

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.

Hundreds of years after a plague-induced apocalypse collapsed civilization back to iron and horsepower, the Hyllises have a genetic tendency to inherit “talents” such as telekinesis, teleportation, and telepathy. Though they aren’t powerful talents, they help the Hyllises diagnose and treat the underlying causes of many illnesses in their role as healers. In this book, their town of Clancy Vail is struck by the plague. In order to save thousands of lives, they must master and use the knowledge of epidemiology contained in their copies of the ancients’ books.