Read What Reviewers are Saying...

Sandra Whelchel, Executive Director
of the National Writers' Association

Ted McFadden's Hermes' Viper main character, Hera makes the real life California Black Angel look like "Bo Peep." The frightening thing is that although Hermes' Viper is fiction, it could be lifted right from the pages of the national news. This is definately not a book you want to give to your favorite person when they are going in for surgery. Otherwise it is a compelling read. Hera is one of those otherwise bland people, like Lawrence Sander's Zoe Kohler in The Third Deadly Sin. Hera wouldn't stand out it a crowd, but her deadly deeds are hair-raising.

The novel will raise your consciousness of just how life-threatening a hospital visit really is. Fortunately the masses are beginning to wake up to the realization that the medical profession is, indeed, in need of drastic changes and the cause of our maladies need to be treated, not the effect by slapping a bandage on, OR popping a pill as a curative. Excellent, excellent book. It's long overdue. This writer is a pioneer in many ways. God Bless You Joseph T. McFadden for telling the truth in your brilliantly written novel.

If you enjoy a mystery with some horrifying twists, this is the book for you.

Jim Pratt of the Oxford Town Paper
reviewed Hermes' Viper:

Joseph T. McFadden has written a novel that cuts into the mind through the reader's eyes and exposes the frailty of life and death in a 3000-bed charity hospital. McFadden's book is Hermes' Viper an intriguing murder mystery:

Dr. Stuart Holden is the surgeon, born in Alabama and practicing his specialty in the South Chicago Hospital. He has been in residence for 16 years when the story begins. He is a single father raising three children, since his wife died of a mysterious disease four years ago. It is revealed that the woman stalker infected the woman while she slept at home.

The woman, a hospital employee, is in love with him and extends her mercy deaths to his family so that she can possess him. Her illness is called "Old Maids' Disease," medically termed erotomania. To complicate matters she has a multiple personality disorder and disguises herself into at least 10 different people. Child abuse and tragic burns brought on her condition from a fire that scarred her body and killed her mother. She has lost her identity even to herself.

Continue reading Neurosurgeon's Novel Cuts Into Reader's Mind.

Guy Friddell for the Virginian-Pilot Hampton Roads
on Hermes' Viper:

After the first chapter, the 423-page novel had me by the throat. I read through the night and into the next day...

Continue reading Novel Sheds Light On More than One Mystery.

Thelma Rubinstein writes for the Vail Daily
on Hermes' Viper:

What the novelist John Grisham does with law, McFadden does with medicine, setting his novel in a large hospital where an unusual number of deaths are happening. Drawing on his knowledge of hospitals, medicine, and neurosurgery - in particular its successes, failings, and flaws - he weaves a captivating tale of life and death in a large Chicago hospital.

Continue reading Vail Novelist Scores With Murder Mystery.