Medical Mysterys Political

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.

Lou Welcome, from Palmer's bestselling Oath of Office, is back in this heart stopping medical thriller. A desperate phone call embroils Lou in scandal and murder involving Dr. Gary McHugh, known around the Capital as the "society doc." Lou has been supervising McHugh, formerly a black-out drinker, through his work with the Physician Wellness Office. McHugh has been very cavalier about his recovery, barely attending AA and refusing a sponsor. But Lou sees progress, and the two men are becoming friends.

Freelance journalist Nathan Troy is a global citizen looking for eye-opening news. Living in Beijing, he stumbles upon a ward full of patients afflicted with an unknown, deadly disease. Facing closed doors and open hostility, he won't rest until he exposes the dark conspiracy. But as he digs deeper for answers, mysterious figures try to scare him off the trail with tortuous violence. To his horror, it looks as though there's no stopping a shadowy cabal of mad scientists from wielding an epidemic designed for ethnic cleansing.