�Not since Robin Cook has an author kept me up all night reading a medical thriller. Joseph T. McFadden is responsible for a nail-biting, sleepless, scary night of chilling intrigue with �Hermes Viper� his first novel.�
Hermes is Stuart Holton, neurosurgeon to Chicago�s poor, and the viper is a psychopathic murderess stalker suffering from multiple personality disorder and erotomania. Although her disguises are clear throughout the book, the viper�s identity remains a mystery until the very end. More than once my smug thoughts of knowing �who dunnit� were denied, shattered like the villainous viper�s illusions of love. The master of disguises starts knocking off patients at an increased rate in her twisted hope of winning the love of Dr. Holton, the object of her erotomania for sixteen long years. Mercy killing her way through the wards of a Chicago charity hospital the viper insanely believes that by poisoning patients she is helping Holton free up beds to further his career and perform more surgeries. His children give him the idea to use virtual reality to solve the high death rate enigma. A computer literate colleague, a forensic pathologist develops a program using fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence to predict the next victim, someone very close to Holton.
The story heats up as the killer goes after his family, friends, and colleagues, people the viper views as standing between her and the man she has been stalking for sixteen years. Another mystery that plagues Holton throughout the book is the puzzling death of his wife from an incurable rare disease. Once you get started you cannot stop until it is over and you discover just who �Hermes� Viper is and why the abused little girl, rescued from a house fire at the age of five, grew up so warped.
The novel will raise your consciousness of just how life-threatening a hospital visit really is. Fortunately the masses are beginning to wake up to the realization that the medical profession is, indeed, in need of drastic changes and the cause of our maladies need to be treated, not the effect by slapping a bandage on, OR popping a pill as a curative. Excellent, excellent book. It's long overdue. This writer is a pioneer in many ways. God Bless You Joseph T. McFadden for telling the truth in your brilliantly written novel.
Hermes' Viper is sure to be made into a movie, but do not wait, read the book.
McFadden�s second medical mystery, �The Wafer� delves deeply into organ donation and will be released in Spring of 2002.

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:

Forever changes your attitude toward medicine,law & justice  Nov 05, 2000
By Daphna Moore, Publisher
A POWERFUL FIRST-RATE MYSTERY NOVEL THAT WILL FOREVER CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD MEDICINE, LAW AND JUSTICE. Joseph T. McFadden, professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School, has written a powerful novel, Hermes' Viper, set in a huge 3,000-bed charity hospital. "After the first chapter, the 423 page novel had me by the throat. I read through the night and into the next day, " says Guy Friddell, book review editor of The Virginian-Pilot Newspaper, Norfolk, VA, October 30th. More from the review. Idealistic Dr. Stuart Holton is a neurosurgeon in a hospital on Chicago's South Side. He chose that exceedingly active practice out of love of humanity and a drive to save lives. In the reaches of the large hospital wards, terminal patients beyond treatment are routinely found dead, but the dedicated Dr. Holton realizes that the mortality rate among his patients is becoming abnormally high. Then, patients who are not terminal die under troubling circumstances. The guilty party is a staff member, close to him, who is gifted in assuming disguises, ranging from a pink lady volunteer to a minor lab technician. She has sought to get in touch with her own identity since fire scarred and maimed her at age 5. Looking for her true self, she turns to ending the suffering of terminal patients. Armed with syringes and poisons, she flits late at night along dimly lit halls, an angel of death. Obsessed by erotomania, a maniacal fixation on one individual, she stalks Holton and determines to remove all who stand between him and her, whether hospital employees or his family. He can't identify her nor, for that matter, could this reader, even though she records her deadly rounds in a journal. When someone other than my suspect proved to be guilty, I checked and found that the author had played fair in delineating the stalker from the start. I'd been as obtuse as anybody in the book in picking up the clues. They were right there in front of us. One of this book's strengths is its portrayal of the hospital environment, the crises met with team spirit, and the surgeon at work. In depicting the deft motions of the surgeon and his aides in an operation, McFadden comes down close, paring them down to their bare, vivid essentials. Each operation becomes an absorbing vignette, and reading it, one pulls for the patient. The characters are as numerous as those in one of Charles Dickens' novels. McFadden succeeds in making each one believable. The book has two rousing pursuits. When Holton discovers the stalker is on the prowl for his family, he races to find and rescue them. Then, Holton's chase turns to capturing and unmasking the stalker. His second novel, The Wafer, addresses the organ donor dilemma, and he is currently at work on the third, A Hooker In The Choir, set in the nursing home scene of the American landscape. It also deals with HMO problems.McFadden is a brilliant writer.

1 of 1 found the following review helpful:

Health Horror Stories  Mar 26, 2002
By S. Whelchel "thriller author"
Ted McFadden's Hermes' Viper main character, Hera makes the real life California Black Angel look like "Bo Peep." The frightening thing is that although Hermes' Viper is fiction, it could be lifted right from the pages of the national news. This is definately not a book you want to give to your favorite person when they are going in for surgery. Otherwise it is a compelling read.

Hera is one of those otherwise bland people, like Lawrence Sander's Zoe Kohler in The Third Deadly Sin. Hera wouldn't stand out it a crowd, but her deadly deeds are hair-raising.

If you enjoy a mystery with some horrifying twists, this is the book for you.

3 of 4 found the following review helpful:

Everything you wondered about the medical profession is true  Aug 15, 2000
By dood
I can't decide if this book is non fiction or fiction. Couldn't put it down.My wife almost died last year from malpractice and see this wasn't a isolated case.

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