Isolation Ward: Dr. Nathaniel McCormick Series, Book 1

by Joshua Spanogle, Scott Brick (Narrated by)

Overview

Straight out of today’s hospitals and labs–and tomorrow’s headlines–comes a frightening, scalpel-sharp thriller from medical insider Joshua Spanogle. In an astounding debut, Spanogle takes us on an all-too-real race against time…as a young doctor enters the dark side of scientific research, desperate to stop a terrifying epidemic before it is too late….

In Baltimore’s St. Raphael’s Hospital, three newly admitted patients are among society’s most helpless citizens: female residents of Baltimore’s group homes for the mentally impaired, their bodies racked by a virus the likes of which no one at St. Raphael’s has ever seen.

Dr. Nathaniel McCormick is one of the first on the scene. A young investigator from the Centers for Disease Control, Nate is paid to explore the bizarre, the exotic, and the baffling–from superviruses to bioterrorism. But as soon as Nate begins to investigate the lives and habits of the victims, he knows something is terribly wrong. Using all his skills as a medical detective, Nate soon zeroes in on the "vector"–the one person who had sexual contact with the first victims. And when that suspect is found murdered, Nate fears that the disease he’s chasing may not be an act of nature, but of man.

With his brash style angering his superiors and fellow investigators alike, Nate turns to an old colleague and former lover, Dr. Brooke Michaels, for help. Together the two investigators follow a twisting trail of clues to a discovery that is at once groundbreaking and unspeakable. And as a circle of treachery tightens around him, Nate is about to confront the most chilling revelation of all–and a past Nate himself has been trying to escape.

At once a taut medical thriller and a riveting psychological portrait of a young doctor on the edge, ISOLATION WARD is a tale of runaway tension–with a brilliant "what-if" premise that is harrowing…heartbreaking…and impossible to wrench from your imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781415931950
Publisher:	Books on Tape, Inc.
Publication date:	10/31/2006
Series:	Dr. Nathaniel McCormick
Edition description:	Unabridged

About the Author

With his bestselling, explosive debut thriller, Isolation Ward, medical insider Joshua Spanogle earned comparisons to Michael Crichton—and wide acclaim for his ingenious blend of suspense, cutting-edge science, and raw emotion. Now Spanogle takes us into the dark heart of medicine to tell a terrifying story of a billion-dollar medical breakthrough—and the side effects it unleashes….

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

St. Raphael's was an old Catholic hospital, struggling to maintain its independence in the face of overtures--friendly and outright aggressive--from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. The hospital sat in the middle of a decayed neighborhood in the southwestern quadrant of the city, surrounded to the north and west by housing projects and to the south and east by a mix of old factories and abandoned row homes. The hospital served the needy in the immediate area, but extended its reach to the working-class neighborhoods of Pigtown and Locust Point. The last I heard, it was hemorrhaging money and talks with Hopkins and Maryland had started up again, this time at St. Raphe's behest. The former belle at the ball, now trying to dance with anyone who'd have her. Rumor had it the powers that be--admin at St. Raphe's, the Catholic archdiocese, the city, Hopkins, U of M--were just going to shutter the old girl. As the dirty pile of bricks, streaked black and dotted with a few forlorn statues of St. Raphael, came into view, I thought a mercy killing might not be the worst thing.

Still, there was a soft spot in my heart for the place. I'd just spent two weeks at St. Raphe's setting up a program to identify exactly the kinds of things that seemed to be happening. Outbreaks. Bioterror attacks. Bad things. St. Raphe's, in other words, needed me. Not like Hopkins, who basically taught my employers, the Epidemic Intelligence Service at CDC, how to play their game. If every employee at CDC were suddenly to die or, worse, to take a job in the private sector, Hopkins probably felt it could rebuild the Centers from scratch. No, St. Raphael's was a third-tier hospital in a city dominated by some of the best medicine in the world. My job was to get this old gal up to snuff.

Okay, my job. I am an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Apropos of my duties--to conduct surveillance for and investigations of outbreaks of disease--the title of officer is a fitting one. The cop jargon has been with us for a long time. Medical detectives was often used to describe officers in the service by those on the outside and on the inside, though the term long ago fell out of use, perhaps because it sounded a little too self-aggrandizing at the same time it sounded a little too trite. Anyway, that's what we do. We look for and hunt down diseases.

As with many things--fashion, say, or diet plans--there is some circularity to the history of the EIS. Originally conceived at the start of the Korean War as an early-warning system for biological attack, the EIS has spent decades searching for things to do. And it's done a pretty good job of finding them. The Service was instrumental in restoring public confidence after a polio vaccine scare in the fifties, it helped erase smallpox from the world, in the late nineties and early '00s it tracked down and set up surveillance for West Nile virus. And now the country is back to freaking out about bioterrorism. Which is why I was in Baltimore, helping to patch a hole in the country's disease-surveillance net. Normally, an old hospital wouldn't merit much attention, but St. Raphe's proximity to the nation's capital scared the public health gods, who wanted to ensure that any outbreak in the area was identified quickly. So, they sent me to set up a surveillance program.

Me. I'm part of the Special Pathogens Branch, which is in the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, which, in turn, is part of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, one of the Centers in the Centers for Disease C & P. My knowledge doesn't go too much...

Editorial Reviews

Joshua Spanogle's first novel is a smart, fast-paced medical thriller that is also a case study in how a young writer can make the conventions of the genre work to his advantage. Spanogle started with two considerable assets. First, he's a 35-year-old medical student at Stanford who knows all about the physical vulnerabilities of our bodies and the moral uncertainties of his profession. Second -- and they don't teach this in medical school -- he's a first-rate writer. To know a profession cold and to be a born writer is a rare blessing. Scott Turow also comes to mind.
— The Washington Post

Patrick Anderson

Young and brash Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, a maverick investigator for the Centers for Disease Control, leads listeners through Spanogle's fever-paced debut novel. Rummel lends a vocal mixture of naive exuberance and postgrad snarkiness to the action- and technology-packed adventure. A ghastly, impossible-to-diagnose or combat viral outbreak at a Maryland hospital (perhaps too lovingly described in all its flesh-peeling details) sends Nate rushing off in a reckless search for the source of the virus. The journey takes listeners deep into Robin Cook-misuse-of-science country, traveling in the company of a couple of stunning beauties-one naughty, one nice-and a villain sadistic enough to make James Bond's nemeses seem merely playful. With the witty repartee, relentless action, stomach churning violence and mind-melting techno-lingo, it's something of a surprise to discover that Spanogle has also written an oddly affecting coming-of-age novel. Rummel displays a fair amount of versatility, capturing tender moment as efficiently as he handles the less credible confrontations: namely sequences of profound physical abuse from which Nate recovers with jaw-dropping speed. Ah, to be young, romantic, heroic and a fast healer. Simultaneous release with the Delacorte hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 2). (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Why are three handicapped women rushed to the same Baltimore hospital within days of one another? And, after being called in to help, why is Dr. Nathaniel McCormick of the Centers for Disease Control discouraged from tracking a dangerous virus cross country? Spanogle took time off from his med school studies at Stanford to pen this medical thriller, an in-house favorite. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A renegade virus strikes Baltimore and challenges the ethics of the medical community in med-student Spanogle's tightly woven debut thriller. Several female inmates of homes for the "mentally impaired" are isolated in a Baltimore hospital for an unidentifiable, lethal virus that has doctors flummoxed. Could this be a bioterrorist attack? Nathaniel McCormick, 33, an officer in Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is brought in to help determine the cause of the trouble and soon alienates officials with his brash, aggressive handling of the clues: All the women seem to have been preyed upon sexually by fellow inmate Douglas Buchanan, whose cell-phone calls tie him to someone in San Jose, Calif. When this vector turns up dead, Nathan is sent to California to investigate. He hooks up with his former colleagues at The Farm, a so-called university in Silicon Valley, where he once pursued microbiology under illustrious mentor Harriet Tobel, before being kicked out for his doctoring of facts. The second part of the novel takes off brilliantly in California, as Nathan gradually uncovers The Farm's secret research on brain-dead humans. Moreover, the ghastly truth emerges when Dr. Tobel, shortly before her mysterious heart-attack death, leaves Nathan a videotape of a rape of one of these human subjects in a hospital room. Cleverly, Spanogle weaves in McCormick's flawed, shameful past, including his painful love affair with the heartless researcher Alaine Chen. Readers of this engrossing and intellectually wrought first novel will happily await Spanogle's next.

Kirkus Reviews