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Moloch and the Angel
Moloch and the Angel is a paranormal psychological thriller that opens with a childhood vision that transforms Anna Cordero Smith’s life. Decades later, now a practicing psychologist, she has buried her psychic abilities with the losses that shaped her. When Rachel McCormick seeks psychological help for her son Mel—named Moloch—Anna feels those powers stirring again. What starts as an unusual therapy case develops into a supernatural mystery and murder investigation involving telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic energy, family secrets, and a deeply troubled man who may be far more dangerous than Anna initially suspected.
Anna makes an engaging center for this psychic suspense novel because she approaches extraordinary events with the habits of a therapist. She analyzes behavior, questions motives, considers diagnoses, and keeps trying to separate intuition from evidence even while the evidence grows increasingly strange.
Mel is particularly effective as her opposite. His sessions move between vulnerability, resentment, disturbing fantasies, family trauma, and genuine psychic powers, creating psychological tension around what he believes, what he can actually do, and what he’s deliberately hiding.
There’s also a surprisingly warm domestic side to this supernatural thriller. Anna’s marriage to Kevin, her friendships, her patients, the animals around their home, her coffee rituals, and the familiar details of everyday life give the story an authentic feel between darker scenes. Those moments matter because the novel leans toward relationships as much as psychic phenomena. Confronting Mel forces Anna to reassess her mother’s psychic legacy and reclaim the gift she once associated with guilt and exploitation.
As the paranormal thriller builds toward its climax, the psychic elements become increasingly vivid, with telepathic attacks, energy drains, spirit guides, dream states, and battles fought as much through consciousness as through the physical world. The final confrontation delivers the book’s central insight: psychic power does not determine character; the choices made with it do.
With its mixture of psychological thriller, paranormal suspense, psychic mystery, family drama, and murder investigation, the novel offers a distinctive story about reclaiming identity while confronting someone determined to invade and control it. Moloch and the Angel gains real power from Anna’s struggle to separate clinical judgment, psychic intuitions, and fear. It pulls you in on a deeper level and doesn’t let go.
Pages: 314 | ASIN : B0H7T6KXF2
A Different Kind of Tension
More Likely Than Not follows a grieving father imprisoned for his son’s death and the forensic investigator who risks her career to expose the bias, institutional pride, and buried evidence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have spent much of my career in medicine, both as a surgeon and as a medico-legal expert, and one thing has always fascinated me: medicine is practiced by human beings. We rely on science and evidence, but we interpret that evidence through our own experiences, assumptions, and biases.
That became the seed for More Likely Than Not.
I also love mixing real events into my fiction. I think it gives a thriller a different kind of tension when the reader realizes that, although the characters and the story are fictional, some of what they are reading has actually happened.
There have been real cases in which forensic medical evidence was accepted as authoritative, only to be seriously questioned years later, after people had already been convicted and lives had been changed. Those cases fascinated me. I started asking myself: What if a highly respected physician reaches the wrong conclusion, not because he is incompetent or malicious, but because he genuinely believes he is right?
Then I wanted to follow that conclusion beyond the autopsy room. Once a medical opinion enters the justice system, it can influence investigators, lawyers, judges, families, and ultimately the life of an accused person.
That became Mario’s story.
And then I needed someone willing to go back and question what everyone else had already accepted as the truth. That became Amélie.
That is something I really enjoy doing as a writer: taking pieces of the real world and weaving them into fiction until the reader starts wondering, “Could this actually happen?”
How did you balance forensic accuracy with the pace and emotional intensity of a thriller?
I had to remind myself occasionally that I was writing a thriller and not a medical paper!
The medicine had to be accurate. That was important to me. But readers do not need a lecture on forensic pathology. They need enough information to understand why something matters.
So I kept coming back to a simple question: Does the reader actually need to know this?
If a medical detail changes what Amélie thinks, creates doubt about Gabriel’s death, or raises the stakes for Mario, then it belongs in the story. If it is there simply because I find it medically interesting, it probably does not.
Ultimately, the medicine is not what makes the story emotional. The consequences are.
A finding on an autopsy report is one thing. Realizing that the finding may have helped send an innocent father to prison for fifteen years is something very different.
What interested you most about exploring bias through Dr. Lemaire, a skilled professional who sincerely believes he is being objective?
That is exactly what interested me about Lemaire.
I did not want him to be the bad guy.
It would have been much easier to write him as an arrogant or incompetent doctor who makes a terrible mistake. But I think that would also make the story much less interesting.
Lemaire is good at what he does. He is experienced. He cares about his work. He believes in science. And most importantly, he genuinely believes he is being objective.
And he can still be wrong.
That is something I find fascinating about expertise. The more experience we have, the more confident we naturally become in our judgment. Most of the time that experience makes us better at what we do. But it can also make it harder to recognize when our own assumptions are influencing us.
Lemaire never sets out to destroy Mario’s life. He reaches a conclusion that makes sense to him, and once he believes that conclusion, other pieces of the case begin to fit around it.
To me, that is much more interesting, and much more unsettling, than a villain deliberately falsifying evidence.
What do you hope readers understand about accountability and the lasting damage caused by overturned convictions?
That you cannot give someone those years back.
We sometimes talk about overturning a wrongful conviction as though justice has finally been restored. In one sense, of course it has. But what does that really mean to someone who has spent years in prison for something they did not do?
Their relationships have changed. Their children have grown up. Their reputation may be destroyed. They have lost years of their life. Walking out of prison does not suddenly erase any of that.
That was something I thought about a lot while writing Mario.
But I also did not want the book to suggest that accountability simply means finding someone else to blame. Sometimes terrible outcomes happen because several people make decisions that seem perfectly reasonable at the time.
For me, the more interesting question is whether we are willing to reconsider those decisions when new evidence appears.
And that becomes particularly interesting with AI in the novel. Technology can help us see patterns that human beings have missed. But it cannot take responsibility for what we decide to do with them.
If readers finish More Likely Than Not just a little less comfortable with certainty, I think I will have accomplished what I wanted.
Because in medicine, and certainly in justice, being wrong can change someone else’s life forever.
Author Links: LinkedIn | Amazon
A midnight tragedy. A father accused. And a young doctor who dares to question the truth.
When Gabriel Savard is rushed to a Montreal hospital in the middle of the night, his family’s world collapses, and suspicion falls on his father, Mario, a man already shadowed by a troubled past. The testimony of a respected pathologist seals his conviction and silences doubt. Years later, Dr. Amélie Nadeau, a forensic pathology fellow, begins reexamining historic cases with the help of artificial intelligence. The Savard file resurfaces, and with it, disturbing questions about the evidence that condemned Mario.
As Amélie pursues the truth, she uncovers cracks in a justice system built on certainty at any cost. The closer she gets, the greater the resistance from mentors, institutions, and authorities determined to protect their reputations and their power.
The Complexities of Human Emotion
In Vitro follows a couple longing for a baby as they navigate the quiet pressures of a prestigious fertility clinic, where medicine and emotion inevitably collide. Did a particular news story, personal experience, or ethical question inspire the novel?
After completing a residency in OB/Gyn, I did a one-year fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology where I worked in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic. I still have very vivid memories of the patients and staff members I met during this time. The clinic was filled with such optimism and hope, and on some days, such sorrow and loss. While IVF is certainly in the news these days, I had this story in my head for probably thirty years! I wanted to explore the complexities of human emotion, especially the desire to become a parent, set against the backdrop of a high-stakes fertility clinic whose success is based on deception. The current array of medical options available to couples seeking pregnancy is truly miraculous, and I wanted to make the process feel real to readers without overwhelming them with technical details.
Did writing this novel change your own perspective on reproductive medicine?
Not really. According to the CDC, about 2% of all births in the US are the result of some type of assisted reproductive technology, including IVF. There are many reasons for this such as declining fertility rates for both men and women and couples choosing to delay parenthood. Reading statistics in some report is pretty dry stuff, so bringing the story to life by following the lives of couples seeking treatment and the medical professionals caring for them struck me as a great way to help readers understand this increasingly common procedure. I haven’t been to a single author talk or book club where at least one person hasn’t come up to me afterwards and related a personal experience they or some family member had with IVF. Some stories have happy endings and some do not.
I also wished to explore some of the moral and ethical issues surrounding IVF. IVF is an extremely expensive treatment which is not covered by some health insurance companies, so one big question is who should have access. Many couples do not have the financial resources to afford this treatment if it is not a covered benefit. The existence of for-profit clinics raises concerns about commercialization that encourages high volumes and expensive add-on testing with unproven benefit. Many couples opt for pre-implantation testing to eliminate specific genetic conditions, and there is concern this practice might eventually lead to the creation of “designer” babies. And finally, most IVF cycles create a surplus of embryos, which then leads to ongoing questions about freezing (and storing) these embryos for future use, donating them for research, or discarding them. Certain religious and pro-life organizations are particularly concerned with the practice of performing research or discarding “excess” embryos on moral grounds.
The clinic itself almost feels like another character. How did you approach creating an environment where compassion and corruption could exist side by side?
What an intriguing insight! I hadn’t thought of it quite like that. I wanted readers to have enough information to form a picture in their own minds of what the McArthur Institute looks and feels like. The building itself is set on a university campus that is well known for its medical facilities, so there is a certain grandeur and gravitas to the external structure and lobby. Inside those doors, many characters, particularly the protagonist, Dr. Joyce Porter, exhibit warmth and kindness through their actions. Joyce savors the small gifts brought by grateful patients and keenly feels each unsuccessful cycle as a personal failure. The head nurse, Selena, is always ready with a box of Kleenex or a hug and cares for both patients and staff with hot coffee and chocolate chip cookies. A compassionate environment is created within the relationships between the medical professionals and their patients. I also tried to portray the “business” side of the clinic through the character of Dr. Owen Hicks, the Institute’s Director, and the university’s administration. When taken to an extreme, the focus on academic prestige and success allowed Dr. Hicks to begin a cycle of deception and corruption. Like many things in life, objects (in this case the clinic and the technologies it offers) have both a light and a dark side, or what you described as compassion and corruption, and they coexist side by side. Dr. Ajay Kumar is the character in the novel who wrestles most directly with this dichotomy, and in the end, he’s forced to make a choice.
Author Links: Facebook | Website | Goodreads
The calm and compassionate Dr. Joyce Porter is proud to work at McArthur Fertility Institute, where miracles happen every day. Couples determined to conceive flock to the clinic, drawn by its unmatched IVF success rate and glowing reputation.
But behind the clinic’s shining facade lies a disturbing secret. When another doctor mentions a peculiarity in the facility’s methods, Joyce investigates. What she discovers is worse than she could have imagined. Now, she must decide whether to confront the institute’s renowned director about his unscrupulous deeds or compromise her ethics by turning a blind eye. She knows staying silent could destroy people’s lives, but speaking out could destroy hers.
As the line between healing and harm blurs, Joyce must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her patients, her integrity, and the future she still hopes to build.
The Origin
Alex Reinshagen’s The Origin is a globe-spanning espionage thriller built around a chilling question: What if a series of apparently natural deaths were actually the trial runs for a much larger attack? Rookie CIA officer Nathan Gray arrives in Prague under diplomatic cover and is quietly assigned to investigate the suspicious death of an American official. What begins as a single unresolved case soon expands into a trail of covert messages, medical anomalies, political pressure, and competing national interests. Reinshagen gives the story an ambitious international canvas while keeping Gray’s search for the truth at its center.
One of the novel’s strongest qualities is its sense of access. Embassy offices, classified facilities, security briefings, diplomatic receptions, and clandestine meetings are described with the specificity of someone who understands how these worlds function. That procedural detail gives the book its character. Readers don’t simply watch Gray chase clues. They see how an intelligence officer builds trust, protects a cover identity, navigates bureaucracy, and learns which seemingly ordinary conversations might contain something valuable. Prague is especially vivid, but the story’s movement through Egypt, Vietnam, China, Slovakia, Washington, and the Amazon keeps widening both the mystery and its consequences.
Gray makes an engaging guide because he’s capable without feeling fully formed. He’s intelligent, multilingual, ambitious, and occasionally overconfident, but he’s also carrying grief and trying to decide how much of himself his work will consume. His developing relationship with Viktoria adds warmth to a story concerned with secrecy, loyalty, and institutional power. Zeke Mills provides another welcome human presence, bringing experience, humor, and skepticism to Gray’s investigation. Together, the personal and professional threads turn the novel into more than a hunt for evidence. It’s also the story of a young operative learning that judgment and relationships can matter as much as training.
The later chapters bring the book’s scientific, economic, and geopolitical strands together in a conspiracy whose reach feels suitably enormous, yet the resolution remains tied to the people who uncovered it. Reinshagen clearly enjoys the mechanics of international diplomacy and intelligence work, and that enthusiasm gives The Origin a distinctive identity. The final pages close the central investigation while opening a deeply personal mystery that promises a larger journey for Nathan Gray. With authentic tradecraft, international sweep, and a conspiracy built to unsettle, The Origin turns one agent’s first assignment into a gripping fight for the balance of global power.
Pages: 290 | ASIN : B0H6RZVYHJ
Open Wound
Steven Marks’s Open Wound, the first book in The Last Immunity series, is a speculative medical thriller that turns a secretive luxury clinic into the doorway to a much larger biological conspiracy. The story begins with Celia Harlow, a famous woman seeking a discreet medical procedure at Vale Sanctuary, where privacy has been refined into an expensive art. When Ray Danner, a longtime waste-route driver, discovers a living young woman hidden inside a supposedly routine transfer, the novel shifts into a tense escape story. The woman calls herself Mara, but nearly everything else about her identity, her body, and the institution that created her remains uncertain.
What makes this science fiction thriller so compelling is the way it treats autonomy as something built through ordinary choices. Mara has spent her life observed, instructed, and classified, so sleeping when she chooses, stepping into the rain, or deciding whether to answer a question carries real emotional weight. Ray’s cautious kindness gives those scenes warmth without turning them sentimental. His son Evan brings scientific curiosity and moral unease into the house, while Naomi Crowell, an employee inside Vale Sanctuary, shows how conscience can survive within a system designed to make cruelty sound procedural.
Marks writes this bioethical thriller in measured, atmospheric prose. Vale Sanctuary is especially vivid, with its muted corridors, controlled scents, and language polished until violence sounds like administration. The recurring contrast between managed interiors and the unruly natural world gives the novel a strong visual rhythm. It is worth noting that the narration, at times, circles an image or idea a little longer than necessary, and readers looking for rapid-fire action may find the pace deliberate. Still, that restraint suits a literary suspense novel concerned with surveillance, consent, medical power, and the quiet ways people reclaim ownership of themselves.
Open Wound works best when its conspiracy and character story move together. The mystery surrounding Mara expands steadily, but the book never loses sight of the frightened person at its center. Its final chapters open the story into a broader medical conspiracy involving immunity, human experimentation, and other lives shaped by Vale’s work, giving the series plenty of room to grow. Readers drawn to speculative fiction, medical suspense, dystopian thrillers, and morally complex science fiction will find a thoughtful, unsettling story here, one that understands survival as more than staying alive.
Pages: 512 | ASIN : B0GX2V17G8
Wilbur’s Heart
Wilbur’s Heart begins with a premise that sounds like a dare and then keeps following it: a failing patient receives a pig-heart transplant, a bold Boston surgeon teams up with an eccentric New Hampshire device crew to make xenotransplantation viable, and what starts as a medical long shot sprawls into a story about risk, attachment, politics, romance, and the unnerving possibility that an organ may carry more than tissue. By the time the novel reaches its late turns, the book has braided together operating-room tension, public controversy, and the strange afterlife of Wilbur himself with a confidence that is half earnest, half gleefully audacious.
I read it expecting a straightforward medical thriller and got something more oddball and more animated: a novel with scalpels and immunosuppressants in one hand and a streak of mischief in the other. The dialogue often has an old-fashioned, talky vigor; characters banter, flirt, needle one another, and occasionally sound larger than life, but that expansiveness is part of the book’s charm. I was especially pulled in by the way the novel keeps returning to the emotional absurdity of the central act: not merely “can this surgery work?” but “what does it do to the people who consent to it, perform it, defend it, fear it, or begin to believe in it?” When the book leans into cellular-memory eeriness and Wilbur’s lingering presence, it acquires a pleasantly uncanny shimmer.
I also admired the book’s refusal to become antiseptic. For all its technical talk, it is not bloodless; it is emotional, sometimes sentimental, sometimes wry, and willing to be a little pulpy in the best sense. The final stretch won me over because it commits fully to its own peculiar weather: high-stakes surgery, grief, political fallout, romantic crosscurrents, and a last note that is genuinely strange rather than neatly explanatory. The novel throws a lot onto the table, and not every subplot lands with equal force. But Wilbur’s Heart has a kind of unabashed narrative appetite, and I found that invigorating.
I’d hand this to readers who enjoy medical thrillers, speculative thrillers, science-inflected fiction, and character-driven suspense with a taste for ethical provocation and a dash of romantic turbulence. It should especially appeal to people who like medicine in fiction not as wallpaper but as the engine of consequence. In spirit, it feels closer to Robin Cook than to Michael Crichton: less icy, less purely mechanistic, and more interested in the human ache and eccentricity around the science.
Pages: 263 | ASIN : B0FLVS2TVN
Fade to Blue
In Fade to Blue, author Hank Scheer delivers a story that begins with a scientific trespass and spirals into international coercion. Sarah Brenalen, an exhausted Alzheimer’s researcher at the Memory Research Institute, secretly tests an outlaw idea, accidentally creates T-3, a drug that can wipe out nearly all brain activity in moments, and then finds herself hunted, monitored, and manipulated by a highly organized crew that wants the formula, the sample, and eventually her life. The book opens with Sarah being cornered on a California beach by Marcel, a courtly and sinister operative, then backtracks to show how her desperation to do something meaningful about Alzheimer’s set the whole mechanism in motion.
What I liked most is that the novel understands panic as something granular. Scheer does not merely tell me Sarah is scared; he gives her a humiliating, intimate form of surveillance and lets the dread creep into ordinary acts, driving home, showering, smoking again, trying to think clearly while someone may be listening to her breathe. The early chapters also give Sarah a real civilian life, with her music, her overwork, her boyfriend Rogelio, and her stubborn hope of doing useful science, so the thriller machinery has something human to grind against. That matters. Without that ballast, T-3 would just be a nifty premise. With it, the book has moral friction: ambition curdles into guilt, and guilt becomes a trap.
The prose is clear and propulsive, and that serves the story well. The novel’s sheer narrative commitment kept me turning pages. Once Sarah’s ordeal widens from Bay Area laboratories and freeway gambits to Paris, false deaths, and tactical reversals, the book develops a pulpy momentum that I found hard to resist. I especially appreciated that Sarah is neither saint nor fool; she is culpable, intelligent, frightened, improvisational, and sometimes magnificently stubborn. That blend gives the novel its voltage. Marcel, meanwhile, is the kind of polished monster thrillers need: controlled, fastidious, and all the more venomous for seeming civilized. By the ending, with Sarah alive in Paris and preparing to tell Rogelio the full story of T-3, I felt the book had earned its final note of battered continuation rather than neat closure.
I’d recommend Fade to Blue to readers of techno-thriller, medical thriller, science-fiction thriller, and suspense fiction who like high-concept danger tethered to an ethical mess rather than abstract spectacle. Fans of Michael Crichton will recognize the pleasure of a scientific idea turning predatory, though Scheer’s book feels more intimate and less clinically detached, with a stronger emphasis on surveillance, coercion, and personal fallout. This is a book for readers who want momentum, menace, and just enough laboratory plausibility to make the nightmare feel uncomfortably near. Fade to Blue proves that one bad experiment can cast a very long shadow.
Pages: 283 | ASIN : B0BS4DXMFJ
The Pharmaceutical Industry
Poison Pill centers around a hospital internist who discovers a common thread between the cases of two young patients who present with serious health issues. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Believe it or not, the ultimate inspiration for this novel goes all the way back to a single day in medical school. During my second-year pharmacology course, there was one lecture that departed from the usual lectures on pharmaceutical drugs. It presented an introductory overview of major herbal supplements, not to turn us medical students into herbal experts, but to let us know what else is out there. That, in turn, got me curious about the parallel industry of herbal medicine and the differences between that industry and the pharmaceutical industry. One of the biggest differences is related to regulation: pharmaceutical products undergo a stringent approval process through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), yet the FDA treats herbal supplements the same way they do foods, so that regulations for those products are more lax.
Many years later, when it came time for me to write my third Mark Lin medical thriller, I knew I had to touch upon these two topics. Plenty of past medical thrillers have already tackled the pharmaceutical industry alone, and few have taken on herbal medicine. As far as I know, there isn’t another medical thriller where both the herbaceutical and pharmaceutical industries are presented in parallel within the same novel, in order for readers to compare and contrast the two. I like to think of myself as a trailblazer with this type of story in the genre.
Can you share with us a little about the research required to get the medical aspects of your storyline just right?
With any medical thriller I write, my research involves reviewing facts about the medical conditions I feature in the story, plus stuff about nonmedical topics that are integrated into the plot. For Poison Pill, that means ensuring no factual inaccuracies related to, for example, kidney failure and atherosclerosis, as well as certain procedures with the FDA. Also, I took a look at where things stood with weight loss medications, so that incorporating references to Ozempic and Wegovy in this novel grounded the story in realism and achieved the feeling that the story’s events could very well come true. Interestingly enough, the fictional pharmaceutical weight loss drug and its manufacturer in my novel, Naxipil by Tixerix Pharmaceuticals, is an oral GLP-1 medication, and this comes on the heels of real-life oral weight loss medications hitting the market to replace injectable weight loss drugs.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Poison Pill?
I hope that readers understand that medicine has risks, whether they are herbal supplements or pharmaceuticals. Herbal supplements may seem safe because they are natural, but that is not always true. Pharmaceuticals may seem safe because they undergo a rigid FDA approval process, but side effects can still come to light in postmarket surveillance. In the end, is one form of medicine really better than the other, or are they just equally risky in different ways?
Can you give us a peek inside the next book in the Dr. Mark Lin Medical Thrillers series? Where will it take readers?
Usually, I prefer not to go into plot specifics for a novel I am writing until I officially unveil it for preordering. What I will do, though, is provide a vague and general overview of what this next book entails.
The upcoming fourth novel of the Dr. Mark Lin Medical Thrillers series will be a two-part saga where the events of the first part lay the groundwork for events in the second part. It will also dive into two kinds of issues where the world of medicine crosses into other professions. Specifically, one deals with medicolegal matters, and the other looks at medicine crossing paths with the world of business and finance. I am sure that readers will enjoy brainstorming the many possibilities of what this will entail. But rest assured. The story I have in mind is one that I believe will be very thrilling because it’s highly original. It’s another medical thriller tale that has never been written before, by any author, and I intended to be the first to tell it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Dr. Mark Lin hates greedy drug companies, along with herbal supplements that can sometimes do more harm than good. Two medical mysteries force him to confront both.
First, a young man, only in his twenties, suffers from debilitating kidney failure. The only clue is his use of a mysterious herbal product for weight loss. Meanwhile, a patient has trouble breathing for unclear reasons, though Mark worries about the anti-obesity drug he started taking. Things truly get nightmarish when one of those pills strikes with lethal force, compelling Mark to take action.
Mark now finds himself navigating a web of deceit within the shadows of two rival industries: herbaceutical and pharmaceutical. He will uncover secrets about their so-called miracle cures, confront a company spokesman, and face a pair of aggressive salespeople. But once he puts everything on the line and discovers the true conspiracy, his only mission is to prevent catastrophic death, not just for the public but also himself.
Poison Pill is Anthony Lee’s medical thriller tackling dual methods of healing and the shady practices that do real harm to everyday people.
