Lawrence Gold
Retired physician and long distance sailor.
Author of six novels all with medical themes. Created the Brier Hospital Series which are growing in popularity. Wrote five screenplays based on my novels. They remain undiscovered. We live in the Sierra foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. |
First, Do No Harm
Medical thriller/drama
If you believe that television, movies, or medical fiction, accurately portray what it’s like to be an acute care physician or a critically ill patient in a hospital today, think again. Dr. Joseph Polk is an intelligent, charismatic, and powerful member of the medical staff at Brier Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. This once brilliant physician, a functional psychopath for most of his career, has decompensated. Nurses and front-line physicians see Polk’s indifference, incompetence, and stubborn cruelty, but the medical staff and the hospital administration are willfully blind. Patients suffer, and worse. Jack Byrnes has finally completed his training in Intensive Care Medicine and joins Brier Hospital’s medical staff. Jack has been well trained to care for patients, but he’s woefully unprepared to deal with Joe Polk, the medical staff, enraged nurses, and the hospital’s administration. The strength of First, Do No Harm lies in the authenticity of the medical setting and the struggles of patients and physicians. Joe Polk is a very different kind of villain. Read a review |
For the Love of God
Social drama
If you enjoy medical drama, you’ll love For the Love of God, a novel that accurately depicts what happens when a cult denies sick children lifesaving medical care. While this is fiction, the novel shows practices that continue to this day. An incidental and shocking discovery of a cave with tiny unmarked graves shatters the peace of Exton, a small town in upstate N.Y. More horrifying is the forensic analysis that reveals that these young children died needlessly as the result of neglect and abuse at the hands of a religious fundamentalist cult that disavows medical care. Fundamentalists and their political action groups come to the defense of the cult and the parents of the dead children setting the stage for the final courtroom clash to come. The sheriff, an investigative reporter, the local coroner and two forensic experts from Albany develop the case. When the county DA, a fundamentalist, resists vigorous prosecution, the Governor of New York intervenes and appoints Rosemary and Calvin Brandt to represent the State and speak for the dead children. These controversial attorneys and former fundamentalists have devoted their lives to the protection of children. The final courtroom clash sets freedom of religion against the State's responsibility to protect innocent children. Read a review |
No Cure for Murder
Murder mystery
Death at Brier Hospital is routine and provides the perfect opportunity to murder and get away with it. Jacob Weizman, a physician, and his wife, Lola, a psychotherapist, are holocaust survivors and need no proof of evil in this world. Jacob and Lola are unique protagonists. They’re octogenarians who take the fear out of getting old. Their intelligence, competence, humor, and sense of history make them appealing in a world that too often disdains the aged. After fifty-five years practicing medicine, Jacob is disappointed, but not surprised by several patients’ deaths, even the unexpected ones. Soon, however, it becomes clear that a killer is stalking the halls of Brier Hospital targeting Jacob’s patients. While Jacob has made enemies over the years, he finds it inconceivable that anyone would murder his patients for revenge. The killings mount even as the hospital and police increase security and pursue a vigorous investigation. Finally, unsatisfied with surrogates, the killer targets Jacob. Read a review |
The Sixth Sense
Medical mystery
Arnie Roth, a family practitioner, develops viral encephalitis. He awakens from the near-death experience with a new appreciation for life and an unexpected talent, his sensitivity to smell has increased a thousandfold. At first Arnie is enthralled with his talented nose as he savors the aromatic delights of his world. Soon, however, Arnie discovers that all smells are not sweet and many come with unsolicited messages that profoundly affect his psyche. Arnie can detect danger, disease, drugs, contaminated food and medications, and he senses when his wife is horny. He smells when people are lying to him. Arnie’s nose captures molecules beyond smell, the invisible chemicals that effect human behavior known as pheromones, his sixth sense. Soon the surge of aromas inundates Arnie and puts his sanity in jeopardy. The Sixth Sense is highly entertaining, thought provoking, and touching journey through a world that influences us every day, but one that we know too little about. Read a review |
Rage
mystery thriller
When normal people suddenly attack and murder, their defense attorney hires Dr. Michael Rose, a former cop turned forensic psychiatrist and his associate, Karen Scott to represent them in court. The inexplicable events mystify these experienced professionals, and together they seek a rational explanation. When psychiatric evaluation reveals a pattern among the subjects, Michael suspects that there is more to these incidents than spontaneous psychosis. Using his instincts and skills as a former police detective, Michael and Karen begin their own investigation. What they uncover is chilling. Who is behind it? Why is it happening, and most importantly can they do something before the killer strikes again? During the dramatic denouement, Michael must wrestle with his conscience and the true meaning of justice. Read a review |
Tortured Memory
Psychological thriller/mystery
Dr. Abbie Adler had chosen general, child, and adolescent psychiatrist to treat sexually abused girls. As a victim of such abuse herself, Abbie’s insights make her an effective therapist. In addition, her practice includes adult patients and provides group and individual therapy for a broad range of psychiatric problems including depression, personality disorders, psychopathy, and malignant narcissism. On a December evening, the Berkeley Police find Abbie sitting in her car at Inspiration Point overlooking the East Bay of San Francisco. She’s bruised and catatonic. They transport her to Brier Hospital where they admit her to the psychiatric ward. The nature of her condition, and its cause, remain a mystery. After standard treatments fail, her psychiatrist recommends electroshock therapy. Finally, she awakens but remembers nothing of the month preceding. In addition, she discovers significant memory gaps from the past few years. Abbie had been treating two victims of the Chabot rapist who targeted girls and as she’s making progress in their care, unbelievably, someone abducts and strangles them. Their deaths devastate Abbie. During Abbie’s difficult recovery, memories of past events gradually return. They are fragmentary and torture her with memory flashes and nightmares. Gradually, she begins to suspect that one of her adult patients may be the strangler. When the police find Abbie’s prime suspect brutally murdered, both she and the police are befuddled. Abbie struggles to discover the identity of the strangler and those who may be abetting his actions. Will he/they get away with it? Read a review |
The Plague Within
medical fiction
The Brier Hospital Series Even in the age of the genome and sophisticated biotechnology, medical progress still moves at a snail’s pace. Seasoned investigators are matured by experience and they accept the virtue of the too-slow scientific process. The young, however have been brought up in a world of instant gratification, and they barrel ahead never looking back to see the havoc in their wake. So it is with Dr. Harmony Lane. In her single-minded obsession to cure her patients, she cuts corners and treats a desperately ill woman with an experimental viral vector provided by an unscrupulous research scientist. While he shares her impatience, he cares nothing for her humanistic sensibilities. She uses a similar vector on her patients with autoimmune diseases. While the vector has remarkable curative properties, it soon becomes clear that it has devastating and lethal side effects. The race is on to cure or at least control the vector before it kills again. The novel proves, once again, that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. |
I Love MY Doctor, But...
non-fiction, medical advice
You have questions for your physician, but don’t ask them? Your physician has questions for you, but he/she doesn’t ask them. That’s one hell of a way to run an airline, a railroad, a government, or a medical practice. Why? Fault is besides the point, but difficult or painful questions unasked or unanswered threatens your health and compromises the physician’s ability to help. I Love My Doctor, But… empowers patients and their physicians and offers common sense solutions to important problems in medicine today. The book makes specific suggestions about: 1. Malpractice 2. How much care is enough 3. Matching patient and physician 4. Finding a physician 5. Online information 6. Getting along with your physician 7. Take away suggestions 8. When to go to the emergency room 9. Glossaries: medical terminology and medical specialists |
Deadly PassageAdventure/Thriller
In the light of Boston and Oklahoma City, homegrown terrorism is no longer surprising. Deadly Passage is a multi-layered, high seas, adventure-thriller novel of bioterrorism in a post 9/11 world. The novel operates on several levels not commonly encountered in a high-octane thriller, including insights into the terrorists, their backgrounds, rationale, and subtle conflicts within the communities from which they have been drawn that ultimately condition their decisions and actions. The responses of US governmental agencies mirror these diverse perspectives. Andy Reiss, a physician, Jesse his registered-nurse wife, and Rachel, their barely teenage daughter, head home on their sailboat, Prophecy, after five years at sea touring the world. They thought they’d dealt with every imaginable experience at sea. When Prophecy comes upon a sailboat adrift, they discover two young Americans, a brother and his sister. After bringing them aboard, both break out with a rash that Andy identifies as a deadly virus. Soon it becomes clear that they’ve inadvertently rescued two homegrown terrorists intent on bringing a deadly virus to the Miami area. Soon the disease is full-blown, sealing the fates of the terrorists and all those they encounter. Andy, Jesse, and Rachel must deal with the unwanted guests, their disease, the Cuban Navy, an approaching hurricane, and the U.S. Coast Guard turning them away from safety, operating under the influence of conflicting political and operational motivations in the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and the oval office. The shocking and unexpected denouements leave us twisting in uncertain winds reminiscent of On the Beach. |
A Simple Cure
Medical thriller
A Simple Cure engages the reader in the search for the cure of malignant melanoma. While an uncommon skin cancer, one American dies of melanoma almost every hour (every 61 minutes). The incidence rate has tripled in the last twenty years. When nature, in her ultimate act of irony, strikes Richard Powell, a cancer specialist, with malignant melanoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer, his wife, Terri devotes her life to curing the disease that ultimately kills her husband. While research laboratories are characterized as noble in search of cures, and proprietary drug companies are caricatured as ruthless and materialistic, too often, the distinctions aren’t so clear. The murder of a drug courier to obtain an experimental and promising treatment for malignant melanoma, unleashes a chain of devastating consequences. People for Alternative Treatment, a company created to find cures for rare diseases, had fallen on hard times and become a subsidiary of Kendall Pharmaceuticals, a company with very different values. Experimentation with a vaccine against tuberculosis is showing surprising effects in controlling malignant melanoma at PAT and UC Medical Center. Kendall is enthralled with the economic potential of such a treatment, while researchers are leery and have many unanswered questions. Kendall’s determination to push the vaccine into clinical trial at all costs is in conflict with Terri and her ethical associates. When clinical trials begin, the vaccine’s effects are miraculous. Soon, however, once again, we see the rule of unintended consequences. Sample A Simple Cure |