Hospital Settings: Scary Prescriptions for Murder

I've been taking some time off from blogging during my summer vacation, but I got a burst of inspiration after spending a day last week in the hospital with my elderly father. It was nothing serious, but the visit reminded me why hospital settings are so chillingly apt for murder mysteries: so many potentially lethal means at hand, so many plausible explanations for death, and so much institutional and personal power over life and death. What could go wrong? Medical murder mysteries answer that question with truly inventive plots. And it's no surprise that many best-selling medical mystery authors are medically trained. Start with physician-turned-novelist Robin Cook. In his first best-seller, Coma, set in a Boston hospital, a young woman intern begins investigating suspicious comas following routine surgery and is soon marked for death herself. Best-selling physician-writer Michael Palmer also plays on our fears of medical power run amok in Extreme Measures, which is about an ambitious young doctor confronted by an elite medical clique who will stop at nothing--including murder and mutilation--to protect their secrets. Harvard Medical School-trained Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain fame, actually started his writing career with the Edgar Award-winning A Case of Need, in which the pathologist protagonist tries to prove the innocence of a friend accused of killing a woman in a botched abortion (then illegal). Another medico-turned-writer is urologist Kelly Parsons; his first mystery, Doing Harm, is about an ambitious hospital chief resident playing cat and mouse with a killer, and it won good reviews from the likes of Stephen King. So what about female authors? At the top of any list is multi-award-winning author P.D. James, who put her experience in hospital administration to good use in books such as A Mind to Murder (set in a psychiatric clinic), Shroud for a Nightingale (set in a nursing school), and The Private Patient (set in a plastic surgery clinic). Also on the distaff side, physician author J.L. DeLozier offers a unique protagonist in Dr. Persephone Smith, a psychologist with the gift (or curse) of enhanced empathy. In Storm Shelter, Smith is deployed to an abandoned air hangar turned medical shelter during a massive hurricane, but she soon has something more terrifying to deal than the storm as staff and evacuees begin disappearing--and turning up as mutilated corpses. For more ideas, check out these blogger suggestions: https://storify.com/sillynarra399/the-17-best-medical-mystery-books-ever-written

Sci Fi Meets Mystery: Detecting in Future Time

In previous posts, I focused on mysteries set in past historical eras, but some mysteries leap into the future, and this marriage of science fiction with mystery has attracted best-selling authors and awards. Start with sci-fi titan Isaac Asimov, who wrote Caves of Steel back in 1953 to prove to his doubting editor that mystery and science fiction were not incompatible genres. The result: On an overpopulated future Earth, a New York City police detective, who dislikes his arrogant Spacer superiors and their robotic companions, is sent to the Outer Worlds to track down the killer of a Spacer, aided by a robot partner made in the likeness of the murder victim. The Andromeda Strain, by best-selling Michael Crichton, is a techno-thriller rather than a who-done-it, but it's a great puzzle pitting a hero bacteriologist and his flawed team in a race to decipher clues and stop a murderous alien "biological agent" released by the crash of a military satellite before they are destroyed by a quarantining nuclear blast. Meanwhile, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is set in a “temporary” Jewish settlement in Sitka, formed after Israel's imagined collapse in 1948 and now about to revert to Alaskan control, where homicide detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, and runs afoul of old forces of faith and evil. The City & The City, by China Mieville, is a police procedural involving a psychic journey across borders as two detectives in neighbor cities, one in the decaying city of Beszel and one in the vibrant city of Ul Qoma, are drawn by a woman's murder into an underworld of nationalists intent on destroying the rival city and unificationists seeking to combine them. Finally, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man won a Hugo back in 1953 yet seems strangely apropos today: In the year 2301, guns are only museum pieces, and benign telepaths sweep the minds of the populace to detect crimes before they happen, so murder is virtually impossible--until Ben Reich, a psychopathic business magnate, devises a scheme to eliminate the competition and destroy the social order. There are just too many options to note here, so check out http://best-sci-fi-books.com/23-best-science-fiction-mystery-books/