Please tell us a little about yourself and The Biotech Murders.  

I’m a physician and researcher. I’ve been on the faculty at Tufts University since 1992 and worked in biotech and pharmaceuticals since 2002. I was always an avid fiction reader, and I knew I wanted to try my hand at writing someday.  

What made you interested in storytelling?  

In high school I felt I had to choose between a career in literature and one in medicine. My father was a family doctor in Baltimore for many years. Sometimes he got paid in tomatoes and homemade jams. So I knew I wanted to be a doctor from an early age, but I also loved literature and fiction. In the end, I got into medical school, which was a great opportunity to not be a starving author! And I loved medicine—first in taking care of patients, and later in doing research.   

When I got to retirement age, I had a chance to go back down the road less traveled. Both my parents were big mystery fans, and I caught that bug early on. So that was my natural genre when I finally got a chance to try, and I wanted to combine it with my medical and industry experiences.  

How did you develop your subject? 

I lived it for 25 years! Although I never experienced any murders in biotech, I definitely saw the data manipulation that underlies the plot of The Biotech Murders. The characters in the book are all based on people I met over the years, but each one is an amalgam of several people. There’s hardly any one-to-one correspondence.  

How did you research The Biotech Murders?   

I knew the medicine part. As I said in the Acknowledgments section of the book, I researched the locations, and learned about police procedure online and from some lovely people at the Massachusetts State Police Museum in Northbridge, Massachusetts. For the part about Vietnam, it was more online reading and Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s wonderful [2023] book, Dust Child. I’m also very grateful for all my friends and family who read the early drafts and helped improve the work so much.  

Was your storyline something that you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build/change it as you wrote your novel?  

It definitely evolved. I started with a one-page outline and a list of characters, but the story took on a life of its own. The actual “bad guy” caught me by surprise at the end. 

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.