Read Murder Mystery Novels
and Stories of Deadly Medicine
by a Noted Neurosurgeon

Life in The Deadly World of Medicine

To empower the patient and counter the fatal flaws of the gigantic medical system of the USA, the author’s first nonfiction work brings to the reader an inside picture of its failures and successes. Can the per year preventable death rate of 100, 000 to 300.000, and perhaps even higher, be correct?

Maybe not, but regardless of the degree of accuracy the numbers do reveal the existence of an out of hand problem in need of control. The medical personnel, the drug industry, the hospital industry, and the insurance companies have not been able to remedy the faults.

On the contrary, each of these fields may perform to perfection and still leave a void where no one is in charge of the patient.

Only the patients and their families or guardians, using the wealth of information available to everyone here in the early twenty first century, can put an end to this deadly situation...

Ordering information

Hermes' Viper

Published in 2001, Joseph T. McFadden's first murder mystery novel, Hermes' Viper, has kept people awake at night in the same vein as Robin Cook. This is definitely not a murder mystery novel you want to give to your favorite person before they go in for surgery...

What a great movie this murder mystery would make!

The medical mystery thriller, Hermes' Viper, a novel by a retired neurosurgeon, is one of the best murder mysteries ever to depict the world of medicine.

Take an inside look at a medical whodunit

"Hermes" is Stuart Holton, a neurosurgeon to Chicago's poor, and "the Viper" is a psychopathic stalker suffering from multiple personality disorder and erotomania. As a master of disguises, the Viper starts to murder patients at an increased rate in her twisted hope of winning the love of Dr. Holton, the object of her erotomania for sixteen long years. Mercy killing her way through the wards of a Chicago charity hospital, the Viper insanely believes that by poisoning patients she is helping Holton free up beds to further his career and perform more surgeries. Stuart's children give him the idea to use virtual reality to solve the mystery of the high death rate. A computer literate colleague, a forensic pathologist, develops a program using fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence to predict the next victim, someone very close to Holton... [Read more]

What reviewers say about the murder mystery novel
"Hermes' Viper"

"Neurosurgeon's novel cuts into reader's mind." -- Jim Pratt, Oxford Town News, Oxford Mississippi

"Riveting read, can't put it down. Sheds light on more than one mystery. Had me by the throat, read through the night into the next day." -- Guy Friddell, The Virginian Pilot, Hampton Roads, VA

Other medical fiction by Joseph T. McFadden:

The Wafer

In the mystery novel, The Wafer, untold numbers of doomed patients await the donation of a beating heart. When black-market organs enter the equation, things can turn ugly. In ancient cultures, priests presented the still-living heart at a ceremony to appease the Gods. In modern society, the church symbolically presents the wafer and wine. In "The Wafer," surgeons, the priests of medicine, acquire donor organs to extend another life -- but playing God can have its penalties. [Read more about the murder mystery novel The Wafer]

and . . .

Fulton's Monkey and other short stories

Gossip, whether the dominating or an insidious force, is the underlying catalyst for each of the stories in "Fulton's Monkey." The stories in this collection depict manifestations of human frailty: pride, poverty, avarice, penury, envy, love, lust, racial strife or organized religion set against the backdrop of gossip. [Read more about the short stories in Fulton's Monkey]