Death Shadows

About the Book

When young, attractive, Dr. Denise Goldsmith examines a patient in a metropolitan Los Angeles hospital emergency room and suddenly collapses, all hell breaks loose.  She’s unable to breathe.  Her boyfriend, Dr. Miguel Villa, rushes to aid Denise, and is barely able to revive her. Nearby nurses drop to the floor dying.  Why?  Is it the sick patient causing the crisis?  An intense investigation turns up no answer, no apparent medical reason.  Days later, the same ominous event occurs in other hospital emergency rooms around California.  General panic ensues.  Public health officials in every city go into high gear.  The CDC sends out federal investigators, and the newspapers call it: “The Hospital Plague.”

Desperately, Miguel struggles to discover the cause of the lethal epidemic.  Denise lies deadly ill.  Are terrorists using some occult poison?  He calls for aid from his father, a  lieutenant in the L.A.P.D.  Besides medicine, Miguel has always wanted to be a detective like his father since he was a teenager in gang infested East Los Angeles.

At the hospital, Miguel discovers gang-bangers stealing nitrous oxide gas in the basement.  With his dad’s help he investigates this and other clues.  There’s a trucking company that he suspects is involved.  Then he finds traces of a strange biochemical in some of the victim’s blood.  This important information leads him back to his old Hispanic neighborhood and propels him into extreme danger.

Sid, a childhood friend and a health inspector, helps him by following one of the company’s trucks, but Sid is run off the road by a strange big-rig and killed.  Incensed, Miguel turns to another childhood friend who is the head of the local Teamster’s Union.  Burly teamsters pitch in to get information, but without real success.

Denise finally recovers and enters the frenzied search with a dedication born out of her close demise.  More people are dying every day, and she sees the clock ticking away under the increasing shadow of death.  Working frantically she wheedles vital secret information from Washington, D.C. officials.

Now Miguel and Denise join together in a urgent quest to uncover the cause of the mysterious, out-of-control illness.  They immediately travel to a chemical company in Delaware where by trickery Denise steals an incriminating file.  It then leads them to a primitive airstrip in Mexico.  Suddenly, attacked from the air, there’s even greater danger.  Both narrowly miss being killed as they rush home, retreating helter-skelter across the border.

Back in LA, with the information that they’ve gained, Miguel sets an elaborate last minute trap, and abruptly everything clicks into place.  Our medical sleuths reveal the unlikely criminals behind the virulent epidemic.  Now Miguel’s policeman father can only say, “Kids, I gotta tell you — you’re damn good detectives, just as good as you are at being doctors.  But for Christ-sake, please keep your day jobs, it’s safer . . .  okay?”

About the Author

Glenn was a screenwriter as well as a novelist publishing two previous novels before. He formerly practiced medicine in Los Angeles for forty years. He started to write when he retired from the medical profession. This novel is about Alaska, a state that Glenn visited ten years ago, captured both his love and interest. Glenn worked on this novel for about ix years and was just finishing it when he passed away in July of 2005. The book is now being submitted by his wife Marie Mahan.