Medical Fiction Booklist overbooked.com

A booklist featuring books with themes related to health and medicine. The list may include literary fiction as well as genre fiction.

Author: Benson, Ann
Title: The Plague Tales
PW
What happens when the bubonic plague, long absent from modern society, is unwittingly set loose on an unsuspecting world? Ann Benson's provocative debut novel, weaving together alternating stories from the 14th and 21st centuries, will captivate readers of historical fiction and startle lovers of suspense.
Author: Berg, Elizabeth
Title: Range of Motion
PW
A woman's intense belief that her husband will recover from a coma, and her ways of keeping in touch with him - and with the beauty of life - as she visits, works, and waits, comprise this emotionally satisfying story by the author of Talk Before Sleep. "Steeped in grace, with and compassion...so compelling you wish it would never end". -- Barbara Lazear (The Habbit of Loving).
Author: Connelly, Joe
Title: Bringing Out the Dead
BL
Frank Pierce, a brash EMS medic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen, is being destroyed by the act of saving people. Addicted to the thrill, Frank is nevertheless drowning in five year's worth of grief and guilt. His wife has left him, he's drinking on the job, and just a month ago he "helped to kill" an 18-year-old asthmatic girl. Now she's become the waking nightmare of al his failures. In a narrative that moves with the fierce energy of an ambulance run, listeners follow Frank through two days and nights of excitement and dread.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Author: Brooks, Geraldine
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 067091021x Date: 2001
PW
A young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death as she and her community are tested by one of the greatest catastrophes ever to befall England. This gripping historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village", in the rugged mountain spine of England in 1666.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 6/21/01
Marker
Author: Cook, Robin
Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 0399152938 Date: 2005
PW
New York City medical examiners Dr Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton are back to pursue the causes of seemingly unrelated patient deaths. When Laurie is pulled into the nightmare as a potential victim herself, she and Jack race to connect the dots-and save her life.
Suggested Reading: Medical Thrillers
Updated 4.25.05
Author: Cook, Robin
Title: Fatal Cure and Harmful Intent
Kirkus
Also: Acceptible Risk, Brain, Chromosome 6, Coma , Contagion, Fever, Mindbend, Mutation, Outbreak, Terminal, Toxin,Vector, Vital Signs.
Author: Dooling, Richard
Title: Critical Care
Kirkus
The National Book Award finalist for White Man's Grave now presents a scathing, hilarious satire of doctors, lawyers, hospitals, health care, life and death. When Felicia Potter comes to the hospital to visit her comatose father, a young resident sees the opportunity to spice up his grim routine with a little romance.
Author: Gerritsen, Tess
Title: Gravity
PW
A young NASA doctor must combat a lethal microbe that is multiplying out of control - and in space. - Publisher Marketing
Also: The Surgeon, Bloodstream, Harvest, and Life Support.
Heat Shock
Author: Greer, Robert O.
Publisher: Mysterious $ 24.95 ISBN: 0892967536 Date: 2003
Booklist
The author of the C.J. Floyd novels turns to the world he knows best--high stakes medical research; in this riveting medical thriller, ripped from today's headlines, abandoned uranium mines prove deadly to Carmen Nguyen.
Updated 9.22.03
Author: Lynch, Patrick
Title: Omega
PW Kirkus
The bestselling author of Carriers delivers a cutting-edge, all-too-real medical thriller set against the terrifying backdrop of an imminent and devastating plague. As an increasing number of his patients succumb to a series of drug-resistant infections, surgeon Marcus Ford seeks out a genetically engineered antibiotic - the existence of which is only a rumor.
Also: The Policy.
Author: Menaker, Daniel
Title: The Treatment
BL PW
Note - From the Advance Reader's Edition: Jake Singer, and anxious young English teacher at a a prestigious New York prep school, is headed for a life of personal despair and professional mediocrity. Recently abandoned by his girlfriend, disgusted with his own neurasthenic idling, and emotionally paralyzed by a case of the vapors, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a black-bearded, body-building, Cuban Catholic Freudian whose accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition... Menaker's comic genious is matched and deepened by profound compassion, and by the wistful sadness that animates his wit. He has written a brilliantly conceived, hilarious, and very sexy book - a stunning first novel.
Author: Moran, Thomas
Title: The World I Made for Her
BL Kirkus
James Blatchley breathes and eats through tubes, slipping in and out of a coma. Nuala is the Irish immigrant nurse who coaxes him toward survival. The odd synergy of their relationship serves as both his link to reality and his inspiration to fantasy, in this hypnotic story by the author of The Man in the Box.
Author: Palmer, Michael
Title: Critical Judgement
PW
For reader's who propelled Silent Treatment onto the New York Times bestseller list, here is the most eagerly awaited medical suspense novel of the year. From day one Dr. Abby Dolan has felt uncomfortable working in the emergency room of Patience Regional Hospital in Patience, California. When her fianc, starts acting strangely after working for a large manufacturer, Abby suspects foul play, but is she willing to die to prove it? Also: Extreme Measures, Miracle Cure, Side Effects, Silent Treatment, and Natural Causes.
Author: Pottinger, Stanley
Title: The Fourth Procedure
PW
An accomplished attorney... a leading surgeon...a congressman linked to a bizarre death... they are all players in a plan so outrageous and unthinkable that it will smash every assumption about the limits of the human body. "A mind-boggling medical thriller to end all medical thrillers" - Kirkus Reviews.
Author: Powers, Richard
Title: Operation Wandering Soul
PW Kirkus
Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amidst the nightmarish diseases and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for the National Book Award. " Like the stories read to children, this intensely caring novel can help prevent the nightmare is describes". -- USA Today.
Author: Shem, Samuel
Title: Mount Misery
PW
Samuel Shem, the pseudonym for a physician whose experiences at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Beth Israel Hospital were the inspiration for the classic black comedy House of God, returns to the same subject in his brilliant new novel set in a psychiatric hospital.
Author: Wilson, F. Paul
Title: The Select
PW
Quinn Cleary is smart, idealistic, and poor. She's been accepted ath the Ingraham, a presitgious medical school where a select few receive the finest education free of charge. But something is terribly wrong at the Ingraham. Quinn notices subtle changes in the bright, hand-picked students. Then she stumbles upon the silent, staring patients in locked Ward C.
Author: Yglesias, Rafael
Title: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil
PW Kirkus
Going beyond the classic Lord of the Flies and the riveting bestseller The Alienist, the acclaimed author of Fearless and The Murderer Next Door has conceived his most ambitious work yet. When one of his patients kills his wife and then himself, after an apparently successful treatment, a prominent physician embarks on a obsessive quest that will bring him face to face with evil itself.