12 Medical Thrillers -Daniel Kalla, Robin Cook, Leonard Goldberg, Echo Heron... 

Genesis of a Plague

Right now, in a remote corner of rural China, a farmer and his family are sharing their water supply with their livestock: chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep. They share the same waste-disposal system, too.

Bird viruses meet their human counterparts in the bloodstreams of the swine, where they mix and mutate before spreading back into the human population. And a new flu is born....

Dr. Noah Haldane, of the World Health Organization, knows that humanity is overdue for a new killer flu, like the great influenza pandemic of 1919 that killed more than twenty million people in less than four months. So when a mysterious new strain of flu is reported in the Gansu Province of mainland China, WHO immediately sends a team to investigate.

Haldane and his colleagues soon discover that the new disease, dubbed Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, is far more deadly than SARS, killing one in four victims, regardless of their age or health. But even as WHO struggles to contain the outbreak, ARCS is already spreading to Hong Kong, London, and even America.

In an age when every single person in the world is connected by three commercial flights or fewer, a killer bug can travel much faster than the flu of 1919.

Especially when someone is spreading the virus on purpose...

In the most advanced hospital in the world, medical computers ensure perfect care. But machines have no scruples. No compassion. No mercy. And now they have a mind of their own.

Surgeon Chad Dunston helped create The Center, a revolutionary medical facility where computers, not humans, treat patients. Its cure rate is unequaled, its medical successes unrivaled...until a child named Christine Lassiter mysteriously dies. The girl's older sister Maxine can't get Christine's records, her body, or even her death certificate.

Maxine wants Chad Dunston to find out what happened. But the more questions Chad asks, the more dead-end answers he receives. He has only one option left: check into The Center as a patient...and enter a machine-made nightmare, where the only way out may be death.

Author of the best-selling medical thriller The Unborn, Dr. David Shobin has returned with a chilling cautionary tale about the direction of today's high-tech medicine...medical care without the caring, greed raging out of control, and deadly terror as the new specialty.

It's been more than thirty years since New York City medical examiner Jack Stapleton's college graduation and almost as long since he'd been in touch with former classmates Shawn Doherty and Kevin Murray. Once a highly regarded ophthalmologist, Jack's career took a dramatic turn after a tragic accident that destroyed his family. But that, too, is very much in the past: Jack has remarried-to longtime colleague and fellow medical examiner Laurie Montgomery-and is the father of a young child. But his renegade, activist personality can't rest, and after performing a postmortem on a young college student who had recently been treated by a chiropractor, Jack decides to explore alternative medicine. What makes some people step outside the medical establishment to seek care from practitioners of Eastern philosophies and even faith healers?

Jack's classmate Shawn Doherty is now a renowned archeologist and biblical scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose taste for good wine and generally deteriorating health are taking a toll on his career. He has recently obtained permission for a final dig beneath Saint Peter's, and despite his long-standing grudge against the Catholic Church, begins his research-which eventually takes him to Jerusalem and Venice -only to make a startling discovery with ecclesiastical and medical implications. And when Kevin Murray, now Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, gets wind of Shawn's findings, he's desperate to keep them from the public. Kevin has strong political ambitions within the Church, but his association with Shawn threatens to undermine them. Kevin turns to his old friend Jack to help protect an explosive secret-one with the power to change lives forever.