Dr. Earl Garnet Series

It’s spring in Buffalo, New York. At sprawling St. Paul’s Hospital, new interns rush through the halls, staff doctors scramble to catch their protégés’ mistakes, and everyone is aware of one unrelenting threat: A new and vicious strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has hit America hard and is menacing the hospital like a wolf at the door. Wrapped in spacesuit-like garb to search for every possible source of infection, the hospital staff desperately tries to protect the lives of patients–and of each other. Yet despite St. Paul’s best efforts, people are dying.

In this chilling medical landscape, no one notices the slight spike in the death rate in a palliative care ward. The prevailing attitude is “They’re supposed to die. That’s why we call them terminal.” When these same patients complain of terrifying near-death experiences, the hospital staff attributes it to delirium caused by medication. But when ER chief Dr. Earl Garnet gets blamed for the unexpected death of a patient, he defies protocol and opens an independent investigation. He quickly becomes suspicious that something far more sinister than disease is killing the hospital’s most vulnerable patients.

For Garnet, looking into the deaths means rattling relationships that have been built over years–relationships with several men and women he once trusted but now must doubt. With the SARS epidemic spinning out of control and a storm of suspicion, fear, and mistrust raging through the corridors of St. Paul’s, the hospital is rocked by a horrifying crime: A respected researcher is found brutally murdered. And his executioner may be ready to strike again.

With brilliant pacing, scalpel-sharp suspense, and an unmatched knowledge of the workings of a big-city hospital, Peter Clement is a thriller writer in a league of his own. In his new work, he takes us on a galvanizing, frightening, and constantly fascinating journey set on the front lines of medicine–where some dangers can be prevented and others can only be feared.

In a small upstate New York town, an idyllic lake yields a ghastly discovery when the skeletal remains of a young woman missing for twenty-seven years are pulled from the icy depths—along with unmistakable evidence of her murder. Suddenly, the long-dormant case of Kelly McShane Braden’s mysterious disappearance is reactivated. And for two devastated men, dark emotions and disturbing secrets will also rise to the surface.

For local coroner Dr. Mark Roper, the murder is more than just a grim interruption of his general practice in sleepy Hampton Junction. Kelly Braden had been a surrogate sister. When the police insist the trail of Kelly’s disappearance is too cold to pick up again, he vows to find the missing pieces of the past that will lead him to a killer. Because that’s what cracks cold cases: “One guy who can’t get it out of his head.”

Yet Mark isn’t the only one with Kelly’s murder on his mind. Dr. Earl Garnet, chief of staff at Buffalo’s St. Paul’s Hospital, was once Kelly’s secret lover . . . and would-be savior. Until his plans to rescue her from an abusive marriage were cut short by her vanishing. Now, as the last person to see Kelly alive, he’s in danger of becoming the prime suspect, unless he can unmask the murderer first.

But neither man knows about the twisted chain of lies and corruption that led to Kelly’s death—or the shocking revelations that were meant to go with her to a watery grave. And the harder they push for answers, the easier they make it for their lethal quarry to zero in on them—and push back with deadly force.



With Mortal Remains, Peter Clement remains in total control of readers’ nerves from the very first page, once more wielding heart-racing suspense and scalpel-sharp terror with a master surgeon’s skill.

"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement’s first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again–combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.

With authentic detail and a surgeon’s precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine, one threat is more dangerous than contagion: the threat of human beings deciding who should live and who should die. . . .

Death is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Now, in his pressure cooker career, Dr. Earl Garnet has broken the cardinal rule of modern medicine: he publicly blames a powerful HMO for practicing "no-fault murder" in the death of an eighteen-month-old baby. The HMO swiftly strikes back, igniting a debilitating boycott of the hospital. But after several accidents nearly cost patients their lives, the true bloodletting begins. A doctor is found sprawled out in the parking lot, his throat cut ear to ear.

Blamed for instigating the chaos, Earl Garnet knows that he faces more than a deadly power play. The doctor may have uncovered a conspiracy reaching from the halls of one of the nation’s most influential HMOs to a small, experimental clinic in Mexico, where yet another of his patients went for treatment and disappeared. To find answers, Garnet must wade deep into the murky, surreal workings of today’s health care industry.

Smart, tough, crackling with suspense, and vivid in its hospital setting, this visionary novel instantly places Peter Clement in the distinguished company of Michael Palmer and Robin Cook. Make no mistake: The Procedure is the work of a first-rate physician and an absolutely brilliant storyteller.