People are again dropping like flies in Dr. Steele\’s ER. She is facing another string of unexplained deaths, but this time it\’s even harder.

Why? Because she doesn\’t mind seeing them dead.

They are the worst of the worst: wife beaters, child abusers, pet killers, and downright psychopaths that the law failed to punish. Even worse, it fails to protect their innocent victims. Can this be God\’s work? Did God get busy cleaning their community of evil? Emma doesn\’t think so.

She finds the answer disturbingly near. It isn\’t God; it\’s a human, way too close for comfort. As she struggles to decide, she finds herself engaged in the fight of her life to protect everything she holds dear. Will she destroy the evil, or will it crush her first?

This is an excerpt from POISON, an ER thriller.

“Put me down. Put me down, you motherfuckers. I’m gonna kill you all. Every one of you. I’m going to stab you in your sleep. Put me down!”

The kid was tied to the stretcher, his hands cuffed in front of him. The EMTs pushed the gurney. The police officers walked behind, their heads low.

Really? Cuff a kid? What’s he? Nine? Ten? That looks like overkill.

Judy came in just as Emma finished sewing.

“The kid.”

“Yes.”

“We need to sedate him.”

“Will he take a pill?”

“No. He ripped apart the mattress. He’s now hitting his head against the wall.

“Give him 5 of Haldol IM. Make sure he’s not allergic.”

Judy left. The closed door muffled the screams, making them even eerier.

“Let me go, you fuckers. I’m going to kill you all. And your babies. And your mothers. And your cats.”

The Haldol didn’t touch him. He peeled the paint off the walls, put it in his mouth, then spit it against the door.

“This young man has issues,” Emma said. “What happened at home?”

The police officer was a former EMT. “Hello, Dr. Steele. His mother called us. He killed the cat.”

“He killed the cat?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He stabbed her with a knife.”

“Wow! That’s different.”

“Not for him. Last week he set the dog on fire. He poured gasoline on him and lit him up.”

Emma felt sick.

“The mother called us because he threatened to kill the baby.”

The urge to vomit became overwhelming.

“Excuse me.” She rushed to the bathroom to splash cold water over her face. Something is wrong with this kid. No normal kid would set the dog on fire or stab the cat. What the heck do I do with him?

The speakers called her before she could figure it out.

“Dr. Steele to Room 1. Code 99. Code 99 Room 1.”

The code in Room 1 looked familiar. She leaned over to see him better.

“It’s yesterday’s drunk driver,” George said, looking up from the IV he was placing. Joe continued CPR.

One hour and many procedures later, the patient was still dead. Police came.

“I thought you took him into custody?” Emma asked.

“We did. They let him out yesterday.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “The judge did. His lawyer got him out on bail.”

After he left, George and Emma looked at each other.

George shrugged. “God’s work.”

“I don’t know, George. It’s getting hairy. I’m not that religious. It’s hard to believe that, suddenly, God decided to fix our community. We need to look into what’s happening.”

George disagreed. “We’re not the police. It’s not our job.” He glanced around, checking that nobody listened. “Listen, this guy already killed two people—his mother, and the kiddo the other day. Maybe the kid’s mother too. We don’t even know yet. He was a danger to society. The world is better without him.”

Emma couldn’t disagree, but she couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened. The screams coming out of Room 6 reminded her. The kid. He had set the dog on fire, stabbed the cat, and threatened to kill the baby.

What if the world was better without him too?

Rada Jones MD  is an Emergency Physician in Upstate NY where she lives with her husband, Steve, and his deaf black cat, Paxil. POISON is Book 3 in her ER thriller series following OVERDOSE and MERCY.

People are dropping like flies in Dr. Emma Steele\’s ER, and nobody knows why. A new disease? Medication errors? Poisoned oxygen? She must find out, even though her job is in peril, her daughter disappeared, and she\’d rather be home, drinking wine.

A mercy killer? But why would he kill a healthy patient? Are they framing her nurses? Or herself? A patient dies by stolen medications, her orders are corrupted by lethal mistakes and her nurse is killed. What happens to her daughter is worse than death.

Dr. Steele risks her career and her life to stop the murders. She gets closer and closer to the answers. Until she gets too close.

Angel

I love kids.

Pretty kids. Nice kids. Normal kids.

Not this. This is not a kid.

This is thirty pounds of human flesh kept alive by devices. Peg tube, trach, vent.

He’s got contractures everywhere. He’s so folded he’d fit in my carry on. Not that I’d want to take him anywhere.

I check his chart. Evan. He’s twelve. He can’t see, he can’t talk, he can’t eat, he can’t breathe.

What’s the point of being alive? If you call this alive. He doesn’t know he’s alive. He can’t think.

Can he feel? Let’s find out.

I stick a #18 needle in his heel.

He pulls away and tries to scream. He can’t. He snorts.

He feels pain. That sucks. I wouldn’t have my dog live like this! Any dog! And he’s human, if only in name.

I look around. They’re busy.

I turn off the alarms and I detach his tracheostomy from the vent. I cover it with my palm, pretending I’m cleaning it. I wait for the heart to stop.

It takes forever.

I reconnect the vent and leave.

Bye-bye, Evan. If they ask, tell them Carlos sent you!

This excerpt is from MERCY, Book 2 of the ER Crimes, the Steele Files. Book 1 is OVERDOSE, and Book 3 is POISON.  Find out more at RadaJonesMD.com

My second thriller in the ER crimes, MERCY, was the hardest one to write. Like every middle child, it got ignored a lot.

OVERDOSE came out with a bang. I obsessed on it like a mother on her first child. Nothing else mattered. I made sure no harm would come to it. I combed through it again and again. I changed my mind a hundred times. About the title. About the cover. About the narrator. I put it out for preorder three months early. I reviewed it seven times. I marketed its every coma.

I thought it would be my only book.

I was wrong.

The morning after I published it, I found myself wondering what happened next. Where did my characters go? What did they do? What happened to Emma? To Taylor? To Umber?

I had to find out, so I looked for the sequel. There was none. I had to write it.

I sat down with my old friends, looking for the answers.

The beginning was easy. I knew the characters. I knew the place – did I know the place! I knew the problems. I started writing. It was like going home after a nasty shift and telling your spouse stories about your day.

It took about fifty pages for things to turn bad. I was running in circles. Nothing was happening. I didn\’t know how to make it happen. I was stuck.

That\’s what they call the sagging middle. It\’s an affliction common to writers and beer lovers. Not to me. I don\’t drink beer. Like Emma, I drink wine.

I muddled through the doldrums, struggling to put down my fifteen hundred words a day, no matter what. I wrote things I didn\’t want to read. Even I found it boring.

Then, all of a sudden, it came to me. I knew who had to die. I just had to kill them. The end was fun. The fights were awesome. I went back to the beginning to plant the seeds, making everything fall into place. I made the villains worse and the heroes better. I wrote in old memories: the rocking chair, the dog leash, the knife. Even the fries.

What was the best part? Getting my old friend, Gypsy, back.  I\’ve been hurting since she left us. Having her back, even if only on the page, gave me solace.

The worst part? Emma had to suffer. A lot. Looking back into your pain isn\’t easy. It hurt her and it hurt me. But it made Mercy a better book.

The first draft finally over, I put Mercy away to ripen.

Since I had to have something to do, I wrote Poison. That was a joy to write from the beginning to the end. I pushed Emma and Taylor even harder. The greatest surprise was Amber. She became real, threatened, and human. And, in case you never played computer games, so you don\’t know, killing villains is a lot of fun.

So, since play is play and work is work, I put Poison away and I got back to Mercy. Like every neglected child, it misbehaved. The sagging middle kept sagging, so I had to operate. In case you don\’t know, I\’m not a surgeon.

I cut out the boring parts.

It got too short.

I cut out the slow transitions and unnecessary words.

It got rough and hard to follow.

I started over. I smoothed the corners, softened the transitions, killed a few more. It looked like I was on my way.

Six drafts later, we got there.

The heroes are heroic. The villains suck.

The ER is still the ER. Traumas, dramas, codes, JCAHO. They can\’t have drinks on their desks, they don\’t get time to pee, and they\’re pissed with the administrators. By the way: Any resemblance to real places or real people is purely coincidental, OK?

I hope Mercy gives you joy. Thank you for reading it. If you love it, please leave a stellar review. It makes all the difference in the world. If you don\’t, pretend it never happened.

Rada Jones MD is an Emergency Doc in Upstate NY. She lives with her husband Steve and his deaf black cat Paxil. She authored ER thrillers: OVERDOSE, MERCY, and POISON. Find more at RadaJonesMD.com

There comes a time in an author\’s life when she stops authoring and starts marketing. After all, if you write a book and nobody reads it, does it still exist?

A book signing is a perennial tradition. It\’s practically mandatory. So, like any aspiring author, I started jumping through hoops to make it happen.

I tried the hospital first. I knew they were going to be excited about the opportunity! They are my book\’s world! I\’m about to make them famous!

I asked about using a table in the cafeteria after lunch.

If you offer a donation, they said.

I make $1.59 for a paperback. The average book signing sells 3-4 books. Do the math.

I tried the gift shop.

They belong to a franchise. They have their own vendors. I\’m not one of them.

I was feeling hopeless when I tried the library. They said yes. Sarah kindly showed me around, assigned me a table, and advised me to bring some wrapped sweets rather than my very special brownies.

Therefore on Saturday, July 13th, 2019,  2-4, I\’ll host my first book signing at the Plattsburgh Public Library. I\’ll be signing – and selling –  OVERDOSE if anyone stops by.

I\’m starting to get the hibie-jeebies. What if nobody shows up? I\’ll sit alone, looking dejected, waiting for somebody to speak to me!

Actually, it sounded kind of good. Everybody wants to speak to me in the ER: Patients wanting a script, families wanting an admission,  Etown sending me a patient, pharmacy telling me the patient is allergic to something he takes every day, the radiology tech telling me I\’m X-raying the wrong leg.

I\’m awful popular in the ER.

Not in the library.

How do I fix that? Wine, I thought. Emma and I, we love wine.

Not allowed.

I went for the next best. I got chocolate.

As to being alone, I invited my sister-wife, Sharon.

You didn\’t know I had a sister-wife? I do. Sharon\’s number one. I\’m number three.

Sharing a husband,  even at different times,  creates a special kind of kinship. She understands where I\’m at. I understand how she got where she\’s at.

Back to the signing. Steve printed posters.

No place to put them up. For a country proud of her freedom of speech, there aren\’t many places you can post stuff. None at CVPH. Nothing at Walmart. Nothing at Price Chopper, the post office or Sam\’s.

The Co-Op was good to me. So were Condo Pharmacy, Dame\’s wine store, and the cozy Keene library. Friends helped. There may be posters in places I don\’t know of.  Or not.

Promoting a book is a lot like motherhood: You gestate her for a year, you birth her, then you try to find her playdates, while you\’re pregnant with her brother.

I\’m working on the raffle  – I have Audible codes to give away in exchange for reviews. I\’ll buy flowers. I\’ll put on makeup. I\’ll do my best to look both comfy and professional, pretending that I don\’t really care if anybody shows up.

Stop by will you? I\’d love to see you there.

I\’ll tell you about Mercy. Maybe even read a scene.

If you don\’t get a book, I\’ll autograph you a card. May be worth money someday!

Thanks for being here.

Be well, and, as always, keep in touch, will you?

Sometimes I\’d like to get bored. In this life.

Not happening.

The good news: After all the fun Steve and I had with the ketchup and shower curtains (what are you thinking? I\’m talking creating a book cover, see my last post), I had to accept that there are things that I can not do. That\’s been the roughest awakening I\’ve had since I was five and my neighbor Cipri showed me how he could write his name in the snow. I couldn\’t.

A man\’s got to accept her limitations, so I outsourced the cover. For $25, the cover designer made it better than I could have dreamed for.

Now that I had a cover, I thought I had a book. Nope.

My Writer\’s Digest editor told me that I didn\’t. He spent a lot of time and many pixels to convince me.

\”I’m unsure why you used this as a prologue. Is there a reason the reader needs to see him take the pills? Even if there is, if you have a prologue at all, it should be to create a sense of ominousness, a sense of looming danger, if you want this to satisfy thriller readers.\”

He got more upset as things progressed – or failed to.

\”I’m not sure of the importance of all this backstory, but at any rate, I don’t think you need to put it in here, when the story needs to take off. Save this for later and get some conflict going.\”

And more upset still.

\”Your email suggested that you hoped to market this as a medical thriller, so most of my comments, both here and in the line-edit comments, are made with that in mind. This is much too slow starting for a modern mainstream thriller. Readers tend to be impatient. If you can’t draw them into a captivating story relatively soon, they will soon lose interest, put your book down, and download something else. Fifty pages in, you are only beginning to get the main plot off the ground, and we only have rudimentary hints of any danger or threatening situation. That needs to change.\”

Building up to a hemorrhagic stroke, in the grips of frustration he slashed 1,987 commas, added another 1,785 (elsewhere), capitalized words that I hadn\’t, decapitated those that I had, and expunged every \”was\”, \”is\”  and \”are\” in the book.

Then this:

\”You might hiss an “s” but you can’t hiss entire sentences.\”

\”Well, Mr. Editor, you don\’t know me. I can! Just listen to me now!\”

I was devastated. I thought I had a book. Turns out I didn\’t. Not the book today\’s thriller reader\’s looking for.

I took a long walk. I had a drink. Another. Make it two.

I started carving the book like I\’ll carve the Thanksgiving turkey. I threw away the prologue as if it was the gizzard. I sliced the beginning and moved it to the middle. I nested the creeps between the slices as if I was displaying the legs on top of the sliced breast. I moved the wings to the back.

I ended up with a Picasso interpretation of what my book used to be.

I discovered that you can\’t do audio before publishing and that making it available for preorder is a MUST if you hope to get noticed.

Since I hope to get noticed. I bit the bullet, I wrote a book description. I showed it to my friends. They laughed. I wrote another. I placed the book for preorder.

D day is January 18.

All I have to do now is write the book. And fix the gravy.

I need ten Amazon reviewers. The rules say that I can\’t compensate you, but I can send you an advance copy to review. Any takers?

Love to you all, and very, very special thanks to those who preordered it. I\’ll make it up to you!

The struggling author.

OVERDOSE on Amazon

Thank you so much to my Beta Readers – Joanna, Mauri, Joyce, Sharon, and especially Steve. They read it and pointed out inconsistencies, – like what happened to the hot bath my hero turned on and never got to, or the fresh snow when it hadn\’t snowed for weeks, or the horses in the yards downtown. They corrected my grammar and made brilliant suggestions on how to improve it. Thank you!

It now has a name: OVERDOSE. An ER psychological thriller.

As I\’m still chugging along through the fifth draft, the Writer\’s Digest editor has started on the first 50 pages. At the same time, I\’m studying Indie publishing, audiobook production, and book marketing while Steve is learning formatting for Kindle.

The cover? That\’s another story!

As a DIY aficionado, I forced Steve into one of my white coats, I handed him a scalpel and a milk-filled syringe – milk really looks just like Propofol but it\’s got to taste better. I got him really angry and I started taking pictures of his threatening figure in front of the bathroom curtain. It was an absolute riot, but not an artistic success.

To enhance the drama I splattered some ketchup in the shower. FYI, ketchup does not look like blood: it\’s too light and too viscous. In a supreme sacrificial move, I mixed in some red wine. That improved the viscosity but it made it look like the deceased had suffered from severe methemoglobinemia.

I ditched the ketchup and the scalpel and I tried a few interesting maneuvers with the stethoscope as a nunchuck, in keeping with the plot of the book. The good news: I didn\’t kill anyone. The bad news: it didn\’t work.

I gave up and I hired a cover designer.

I researched metadata on Google and Amazon. For those who don\’t know – and care – metadata is everything having to do with the book which isn\’t the book – title, keywords, length, ISBN. It turns out that \”Crime Fiction\” is more popular than \”Medical Mystery\” and that \”Overdose\” is more popular than \”Addiction\” who nobody seems to care for. The absolutely most popular? ER. Go figure.

I started looking for narrators on Audible. Audio is the fastest growing market, so I decided to start with a Kindle and an audible version in time for Christmas season. Many authors narrate their own book. I\’d love to do it, but since my hero doesn\’t have a Transylvanian accent and I can\’t seem to ditch mine, I\’ll have to hire somebody less vampirish.

Since I became inhabited by these characters  – those that I haven\’t yet killed – and they have their own agenda and a story to tell, I started working on the second book in the series. It\’s a lot of work, but also lots of fun.

Facebook no longer allows me to link my blog to my profile, so I had to start an Author Page, Rada Jones MD. If you \”like\” it, that will keep you updated on my blog. Even better, sign up for the blog – nobody will see your email but me – and it will come directly to your inbox, no Facebook required.

I worked a few shifts; somebody has to pay for all this, and it looks like it\’s me.

Thanks to my son Tim, who\’s become the sage of the family, we didn\’t get a dog. Not yet.

Hope you\’re still with us, and, as always, I\’m looking forward to hearing from you! Thank you all for you comments! See you