The best medical thrillers featuring doctors and nurses behaving very, very badly

Robin Cook is the Grandaddy of medical thriller writers, and I read this not long after it first came out. It is the chilling story of a medical student who investigates why normally fit and healthy patients are suddenly lapsing into coma. 

There is a strong and intelligent female protagonist, which is important to me. Yes, she can cry and even fall into the arms of a man, but she needs to be intelligent and stay strong, and Susan does that here. At the time, I was impressed by the level of authenticity but didn’t believe that anyone in the medical profession would ever deliberately hurt or kill their patients. Now, of course, we know better.

I re-read it before writing this and can honestly say that this book stands the test of time and is still relevant today.

This is the newest book I have chosen and is a slick psychological thriller where the doctor concerned is being forced to do something terrible. That’s not a spoiler; we know that from the very beginning.

The author manages to convey the very real horror of having to kill in order to save the life of a loved one, which is a more comforting thought than that the person we are trusting with our life might choose to take it on a whim.

The pace of this story is relentless, and the pressure that builds as the time for the terrible deed comes near is very deftly handled. It was a real page-turner that I read in one sitting.

I liked this book firstly because of the level of authenticity, something that is very important as a nurse myself. The reader needs to be able to suspend disbelief and if there is a detail that is wrong, it becomes impossible to fully believe in the story. Getting this right requires a lot of research, particularly if the writer does not come from a medical background.

As with Jack Jordan’s book, I liked that the reader could feel sympathy for the surgeon, and could understand why she behaved as she did.

The story in this book also has some unexpected twists, and I enjoyed the tantalizing slow reveal of the back story so that the reader eventually comes to understand what has happened and why.

I have included this book because it was clear from page one that the author really knows how a GP surgery works and the role of the nurse. I wasn’t surprised to read in the author's note at the end that she didn’t publish this until after she had retired from her nursing role.

The detail of how she manages to steal a death certificate and the sheer deviousness involved rings very, very true. The story slowly moves from a “Is it possible?” to actually committing the act in a way that made riveting reading.

I also really liked the fact that the female protagonist was older and described as something of a plain Jane. It made her much easier to identify with (not that I would ever have considered killing a patient, honest!) 

This book is different because the protagonist actually starts her murderous spree before she is a nurse and throughout the story, there are always good reasons for the crimes she commits, which helps you develop an understanding and even relate to her problems, if not her methods of dealing with them. Becoming a nurse just enables her sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, which is very worrying.

The author is not from a medical background, but the nursing side is well-researched, even if I have a few questions about the authenticity of the medical aspects (like the actions of the drugs used.)

There are lots of twists and turns in this cat-and-mouse story as Lissa learns more about herself and the people she works alongside, which makes it a real page-turner.