After nearly a decade’s hiatus, Leonard Goldberg, known for his bestselling Joanna Blalock medical thrillers, is back in the writing saddle with Patient One, the first in a new series from Midnight Ink, featuring a trauma nurse and an emergency room physician. Inspired by the first Die Hard movie, in which actor Bruce Willis scurried around crawl spaces to thwart terrorists, the physician author tells Show Daily, “I wondered what would happen if terrorists took over a hospital where the president or some high-ranking dignitary was, and in the crawl space was a physician who had at one time been in the special forces.” He adds, “I wanted people to see that there are people in the civilian world—doctors and nurses—who sometimes are called upon to do things outside their realm, but they do it and function in a heroic capacity that equals in every way the heroics they do in medicine.”
One of the biggest changes for Goldberg, whose previous books feature a female forensic pathologist, was the timing within the story. Goldberg explains, “In my last nine novels, the protagonist takes a Sherlock Holmes approach to solving murders, and they take place over a series of days or weeks. This novel takes place in the course of seven hours, so it moves with the speed of light. It never stops because obviously a lot of things have to happen in seven hours.”
Asked how his medical background fuels his writing—Goldberg says he is the only physician in the country, and perhaps in the world, who is board certified in three specialties: internal medicine, hematology, and rheumatology—he points out that as a past full-time faculty member at UCLA’s medical school, he published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He notes that the structure for a scientific article, which presents a dilemma and then a methodology for researching and solving the problem, is similar to the structure of a medical thriller. Although Goldberg has pulled back from his medical practice, his background makes him an ideal medical expert for medical malpractice cases, and he is often called upon to testify in court. But he’s trying to spend more time writing. He tells Show Daily, “There’s a wonderful quote that is attributed to Anton Chekhov, who was also both a writer and physician: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.’ I often remember that. It keeps me busy and I like that.”
This is the author’s first appearance at Book Expo. “I know a lot about it, but have never been,” he says. “It’s going to be fun—I like to immerse myself in the literary world.”
