Dr. Richard Mabry almost gave up on writing.
Even though he’d successfully published his nonfiction work The Tender Scar: Life After the Death of a Spouse, and he felt God leading him to write, when the rejections piled up he decided he was misinterpreting the call. Only what he calls “pure stubbornness” kept him going.
Mabry wrote three novels before his first medical thriller Code Blue was published by Abingdon. Now he’s hit his stride and book four in the Prescription for Trouble series, Lethal Remedy, is hot off the press.
“During my 36 years of medical practice, 10 of them as a medical school professor, I participated in several research projects,” Mabry says. “I also served as a consultant to several pharmaceutical firms. Although I never observed any of this, I sometimes read about research that had been fabricated for various reasons.
“I began wondering what some of the consequences might be if ‘doctored’ research results were used to push a sorely needed drug onto the market without adequate safeguards. That was the beginning of Lethal Remedy.” It’s a chilling idea, and Mabry is glad real-life pharmaceutical companies and doctors don’t behave like their fictional counterparts.
“Staph luciferus, the devil’s staph, is something else I concocted for this story,” Mabry says. “I wanted to move beyond the current group of resistant bacteria to something against which there would only be one possible answer, a drug with potential side effects that have been hidden along the way.
“Since, like most doctors, I was familiar with the resistant strains of bacteria, all I had to do was choose an evil-sounding name and give it even worse characteristics. Through this story I want my readers to see how my characters handle adversity, and the effect of their dependence on their Christian faith.”