Guest Blogger - Kim Alden Mallin, M.D.

What if you walked into a morgue to view an autopsy? Hmm. Pretty gruesome. Well, what could make it worse…? What if you looked down at the body and it was someone you knew? Ugh, even more gruesome. But…what could make it even worse? Hmm, what if you looked down at the body and it was you…or at least it looked like you?

That is the process Tess Gerritsen used to come up with the premise for Body Double, the fourth book in her series about Detective Jane Razzoli. She has said that once she gets an idea for a novel, she tries to imagine what could make it worse, or scarier or more horrific. When her son became a typical annoying adolescent, she wondered where had her sweet boy gone…who was this alien? Hmm, alien? What if all the kids in a small town seemed to become “aliens”? What if there was a natural cause for it? What if they became violent? What if…? And her book Bloodstream was born.

When she overheard a dinner conversation about children disappearing from Russia, she imagined what could be happening to them? What if… they were taken hostage and brought to the US as sex slaves? What if Jane Razzoli, her main character, was somehow taken hostage along with them? What could make it worse? Hmm, what if Jane was very pregnant when she was taken hostage? What if…? And the premise for Vanish was developed.

And so it goes.

Tess Gerritsen began her writing career while out on maternity leave and bored. Watching made-for-television movies whose endings she didn’t like and thinking she could do better led to her first book, a romance titled Call After Midnight. She published eight more romances before telling her agent that she had an idea for a medical thriller. To which her agent said "No", she’d better stick to what she knew, since physicians had the market on medical thrillers. That’s when Tess said, umm…I need to tell you something. I am a physician!

Her first medical thriller was Harvest, published in 1996. She recently published her eleventh novel, The Bone Garden. Weaving together a modern day mystery involving the unmarked grave of an unknown murdered female with serial killings from the 1830s, the novel is both entertaining and informative. It brings to life 19^th century medicine through the eyes of protagonist Norris Marshall and his fellow medical student, Oliver Wendell Holmes. As a physician I was equally disgusted and fascinated by Tess’s version of how Holmes came to his conclusions regarding disease spread and control. (The real Oliver Wendell Holmes was the physician responsible for establishing the importance of washing hands in the prevention of contagion.) Her description of a ward full of women, either about to give birth or immediately post-partum, being examined one after the other by a physician who barely wipes his hands in between, carrying germs and pus and who knows what, is horrifying to me. The Bone Garden was an interesting mystery and I loved the medical history twist. Even if it was disgusting.

Now let me go wash my hands…

(Tess Gerritsen has an excellent web site linked above, and I have brought over an interesting interview of Gerritsen from YouTube, this is the first of a multi-part interview, the rest of the interview is easily available at YouTube. Our library owns 16 of Gerritsen's titles in print and as audio books. - Pete)