Plague Within (Paperback) | Released: 01 Jun 2013

Even in the age of the genome and sophisticated biotechnology, medical progress still moves at a snail's pace. Seasoned investigators are matured by experience and they accept the virtue of the too-slow scientific process. The young, however have been brought up in a world of instant gratification, and they barrel ahead never looking back to see the havoc in their wake.So it is with Dr. Harmony Lane. In her single-minded obsession to cure her patients, she cuts corners and treats a desperately ill woman with an experimental viral vector provided by an unscrupulous research scientist. While he shares her impatience, he cares nothing for her humanistic sensibilities. She uses a similar vector on her patients with autoimmune diseases.While the vector has remarkable curative properties, it soon becomes clear that it has devastating and lethal side effects. The race is on to cure or at least control the vector before it kills again.The novel proves, once again, that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
About the Author: The war in Vietnam interrupted my postgraduate medical training with a year in Colorado Springs and another as a Battalion Surgeon in Vietnam. I spent seven months in the Central Highlands with the 4th Infantry and five months in an evacuation hospital in Long Binh outside Saigon where I ran the emergency room. I returned intact in 1968 to complete my training in internal medicine and diseases of the kidney, nephrology. I worked for twenty-three years in Berkeley, California in a hospital-based practice caring for patients with complicated illnesses often in ICU and served as Chief of Medicine. My wife Dorlis and I retired in October 1995 and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge for a life at sea in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Four years later, exhausted from repairing everything on board, (often many times) we sold the sailboat and within a year took the lazy man's out; we bought a Nordic Tug, a trawler. We motored around Florida, the Bahamas, and the entire East Coast and completed two 'Circle trips' to Canada and back, eight months, the first time, five months, the second. I wrote professionally as a physician to inform but rarely to entertain, at least not on purpose. My novels include: First, Do No Harm April 2007. No Cure for Murder August 2011, For the Love of God January 2012, Rage 2012, The Sixth Sense 2012, and Tortured Memory 2013. In 2013 I published my first non-fiction book, I Love MY Doctor, But..., a lighthearted look at a serious subject, the relationship between patients and their physicians. I've written three screenplays based on my novels and hope to see one or more produced for the screen. I submitted my screenplay, Rage to the 80th Annual Writer's Digest contest and won honorable mention (57 out of 11,000). We live in beautiful Grass Valley with 15 year old Mike, a terrier mix and Bennie, an 8 year old Yorkie who just looks like he's on steroids.