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Evidence Of Our Humanity
The Lambda Factor follows two doctors who are trapped in a hospital and must find a way to stay alive when a deadly virus is unleashed. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?
I have lived in both Texas and Florida, experiencing several hurricanes. After residency I personally assisted in disaster recovery efforts at the Dallas Medical Society Mega shelter in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey and in Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Irma. As such I am truly passionate about bringing awareness from a healthcare standpoint about the complexities that transpire during a crisis to a broader audience.
I have drawn deeply from my background as a family physician and scientist to bring The Lambda Factor to life. I’ve always felt that pop culture portrays medicine in a very one-dimensional light – either we are cold and calculating like House MD or over dramatized situations like in Grey’s Anatomy. I wanted to show a lay audience a more nuanced view of our job, possibly show some evidence of our humanity, and our vulnerabilities especially during a complex scenario like natural disasters.
Did you create an outline for the characters in the story before you started writing or did the character’s personalities grow organically as you were writing?
They were an inspiration from people around me and myself, but they evolved the more the story evolved. There has an outline at the beginning at the start of the novel because I knew where I wanted where I wanted them to, however how they got there has changed and evolved as the story changed.
Was there anything from your own life that you put into the characters in your novel?
Yes, most definitely. My character’s personalities and nuances were drawn from myself and the people around me.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?
I have started writing a sequel which is another disaster medical fiction thriller. It is based in Canada where dormant pathogens that were once living under glaciers are now awakening due to climate change. So the story follows the aftermath of that. Not sure when it will be ready though.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
all-powerful-even heroic. You don’t have to think about how much courage it takes to dwell among the living, to fight for your own life. Lots of caregivers get addicted that way.”
When a category five hurricane threatens a Galveston hospital, patients and nonessential personnel are required to evacuate.
Doctors Danica Diza and Shaka Sen, a chief family medicine resident and a surgical attending respectively, are tapped, along with a skeleton crew, to stay during the storm and care for remaining patients. Their facade of confidence is shattered, however, when the hospital’s inhabitants are exposed to a weaponized strain of a virus with a forty percent death rate. Forced into quarantine, they must struggle to survive the ravages of the hurricane, a shortage of supplies, and the virus that threatens them all.
Written by physician and debut author Dimple Desai, this striking medical thriller provokes readers to consider the dangerous trends happening in our world today and the global changes needed to abate them.
The Lambda Factor
The Lambda Factor by Dimple Desai is a heart-pounding medical thriller that will have you on edge. Mere hours before Hurricane Beatrix touches down in Galveston, Texas, patients of Galveston hospital are evacuated. Doctors Danica Diza and Shaka Sen stay behind to tend to the remaining patients. Unfortunately, a highly virulent and deadly hemorrhagic fever virus is loose, forcing many into quarantine. Will they be able to survive the hurricane, the deadly virus, and the shortage of supplies?
Author Dimple Desai has added a little bit of everything you want in a disaster story; high stakes, well-developed characters, and even a bit of romance. The author’s writing is both exciting and terrifying, just knowing that this can possibly happen in real life.
Dr. Desai uses her medical expertise to make the hospital setting feel realistic and describes things in a way that is understandable to a regular person. Likewise, the characters are believable and seem intelligent and down to earth. From the beginning, Shaka and Danica have flirtatious banter, making them a lovely pair, and I was secretly rooting for them to reveal their feelings to one another.
The stakes are high from the start of the story, making this book difficult to put down. The author flawlessly jumps between scenes from Galveston hospital with a countdown of when the hurricane is going to hit the Biocontainment lab where the Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever has been discovered. But even with these jumps I found it easy to follow many characters, and I always knew what was going on.
The fear that Dr. Wong feels when he realizes that there may be a deadly virus on the loose is where the tension really builds in the story. Because of the well developed scenes, easy to understand medical lingo, and interesting characters, I was fully immersed in the story and felt like I was in the hospital following the doctors.
The Lambda Factor is a terrifying and intense medical thriller novel. Readers will find it hard to put down as the action and suspense leads them through an alarming situation that, at times, is too close to reality for comfort.
Pages: 350 | ASIN : B095MGRMBC
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