Showing results by author "Ken McClure" in All Categories

In The Other Animals, a worm breaks up with a snail, a vulture contemplates the act of killing, a whale falls in love with a song, and more. This funny, moving collection of stories - written by a crew of scientists, literary writers, and comics, and informed by animal behavioral science - explores what animal perspectives can show humans about the world.

Gulf war syndrome: fact or fiction? Saudi Arabia, 1991. Troops are in a state of high alert. The chemical warfare detectors have sounded, and the soldiers scramble into their protective suits. In terse silence, they remind themselves of the vaccinations that will protect them. Then the all clear sounds, and the troops rejoice that they are unharmed. Or so they think.

John Motram has the chance of a lifetime. A cell biologist convinced that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague but by an unknown virus, he is asked to examine preserved bodies buried under the ancient abbey at Dryburgh. However, Motram’s excavations end up in disaster when he first becomes violent and then dangerously ill after entering the secret tomb.

Dr. Steven Dunbar works for the SCI-Med Inspectorate, an elite government agency charged with investigating hi-tech crime relating to the world of science and medicine. He is therefore bemused when the deathbed confession of a convicted psychopath lands on his desk. But it's not so amusing when it emerges that another man has already been tried and convicted of the crime - a man whose medical research once sent shockwaves through the scientific community.

When a top research institute is broken into and vandalised, the police at first believe that animal-rights activists took things a step too far. Then they discover one of the institute's eminent scientists, Tim Devon, brutally murdered. Dr. Steven Dunbar, working for an elite government agency, is sent to investigate. A few of the dead scientist's research animals have also gone missing, and top-level authorities are strangely obsessed with hunting down and killing the purportedly harmless animals.

The governments of the Western world know a terrorist biological attack will happen sooner rather than later. Vaccination is a crucial response, but designing and producing vaccines has never been harder due to stringent trials, rules, and regulations, as well as huge settlements in an increasingly litigious society. There is no such thing as a “completely safe vaccine”, but necessity soon begins to outweigh caution and corners are cut.

A half-dead man crashes his car at the Iraqi border. He is picked up by a British patrol and found to have suffered a rare reaction to the smallpox vaccine. But why are the Iraqis innoculating their population against a disease which has been wiped out for twenty years? A young Iraqi student at the Institute of Molecular Science in Edinburgh, Scotland kills himself for no apparent reason. Nobody links these incidents until Adam Dewar, investigating the movement of smallpox virus fragments between UK research institutes, stumbles on the horrific possibility that the student had been under ...

Dr Michael Neef, consultant in paediatric oncology at a large city hospital, is cautiously optimistic when he is given the go-ahead to carry out gene therapy trials on some of his terminally ill patients. The biotechnology company involved believes that it has come up with a treatment for malignant tumours, and the hospital administrators, reeling after a recent bout of bad publicity, see this as an opportunity to get some good press coverage for a change. But as the trials progress, the press - largely in the form of journalist, Eve Sayers - becomes more interested in the deaths of two ...

Dr. Steven Dunbar has left his job with the Sci-Med Inspectorate and now works for a pharmaceutical company. He is persuaded to return when his old boss falls seriously ill and requests that he take a look into the suspicious deaths of a number of people. Steven makes good progress and is beginning to share his old mentor's concerns when the UK comes under attack. A nightmare disease is let loose on major cities. Steven is co-opted to help out in what seems destined to become a losing battle against a rampaging infection.

Cytogerm is a wonder drug but has been shown to have lethal side effects. Its manufacturers have withdrawn it but now seem hellbent on eliminating everyone concerned with its development. Dr Sean MacLean would like to know why but, as he was head of the surgical team using it, he finds himself in the firing line. His life has become the stuff of nightmares. Ken McClure is the internationally bestselling author of over twenty medical thrillers such as The Lazarus Strain, The Gulf Conspiracy, White Death and Dust to Dust. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages and he has ...

The mysterious letter invited him to an interview for a job he'd never applied for. But at 37, his family life and medical career in ruins, Dr Mark Avedissian wasn't feeling like asking too many questions. Nor, it turned out, were British Intelligence, Avedissian's new employers, prepared to give many answers about his new role in their battle against terrorism. With minimal information they despatched him to America in the company of Kathleen, the sister of an IRA man Martin O'Neill, their brief to rescue a small boy, a child with a terrible destiny. But in the turbulent events that ...

In a village outside Edinburgh, a young boy is the victim of a shocking ordeal while playing by the canal . . . he is attacked by a rat. The village itself is currently in turmoil over a genetically modified crop growing in a nearby field and sinister doubts are being expressed over its supposed government licence. The Sci-Med Inspectorate send Steven Dunbar to investigate. His search for the truth soon gives rise to the horrific suspicion that the rat incident - one of several in the area - might be connected to the GM crop. Is there something in these crops that is somehow affecting the ...

Journalist James Kincaid has a pretty jaundiced view of the medical profession. So when he finds out the truth about what's happening at Newcastle's College Hospital, he's not surprised. He's stunned. Disbelieving. Appalled . . . The hospital is the showpiece of the National Health Service. The brilliant, computerized Northern Health Scheme has dramatically lowered costs and improved services in the area. It's seen as a personal triumph for the new health secretary. A passport perhaps to Downing Street. So why is the new system shrouded in secrecy? What really happened to Greta Marsh after ...

A break-in at the hospital morgue, the unexplained disappearance of certain bodies, intrigue among the senior staff and a chance encounter with a grieving widower prompt Dr James Saracen to question irregularities surrounding the death of a woman at Skelmore General Hospital. Narrowly avoiding personal disaster, he unearths a conspiracy to conceal the fact that she died of a disease believed to have faded out in England hundreds of years ago. The woman has recently come from abroad and the lazy and politically motivated head consultant carelessly assumes that this is an isolated incident. ...

Used to the sleepy tranquility of village life in rural Wales, the residents of Felinbach are shocked by the brutal killing of a local baby, Anne-Marie Palmer. None more so than Dr Tom Gordon, the local GP and only friend left to John Palmer who, faced with irrevocable evidence, stands accused of his daughter's murder. Just days later Tom is co-opted to investigate the disappearance of the body of a three-month-old cot-death victim from Caernarfon General's Pathology Department. But the hospital is anxious to keep publicity firmly on their upcoming symposium on in vitro fertilisation, ...

Klein's death was as brutally horrifying as it was unexpected. Bacteriologist, Dr Neil Anderson is asked by the hospital authorities to try and discover what disease could possibly have transformed a healthy medical student into a grotesque corpse within hours. His invesitigation uncovers an unlikely link between Klein's routine participation in testing a new drug and the research laboratories of Dr Jacob Strauss, one of the foremost medical scientists of his day. Was Klein's death purely a medical mishap? Or was it, as Anderson begins to suspect, the result of something much more secret - ...

When John McKirrop, a down-and-out tramp, takes shelter in a deserted graveyard one night, he witnesses the disinterment of the body of a young boy. Yet no one takes much notice of his stories. After all, who would believe the ramblings of a homeless drunk? Father Ryan Lafferty, the local parish priest, is trying to help the boy's distrught father find his son's body. Alarmed by implications of black magic, he becomes even more inquisitive when McKirrop dies under suspicious circumstances. At the same time, a young female doctor, Sarah Lasseter, begins to query procedures at the Trauma Unit...

Women are dying in Kerr Memorial Hospital. They are dying at an alarming rate from post-operative wound infections which are resistant to antibiotics and the authorities cannot find the source of the problem. As the situation threatens to get out of control, the hospital staff are under mounting pressure and nerves are stretched to breaking point. The Home Office send an outsider, surgeon Scott Jamieson, to investigate and Jamieson soon finds himself in a maelstrom of accusation and counter-accusation. Is this outbreak the result of deliberate contamination or just a freak strain of ...

When three young farmworkers die suddenly of a brain disease, the Medical Research Council feels compelled to investigate. Dr Ian Bannerman, consultant pathologist and expert on brain disease, is sent to make discreet enquiries. But in north-east Scotland, Bannerman finds plenty of cause for alarm - and terror. He discovers a brainless corpse in an Edinburgh morgue; a dead man at the foot of a Hebridean cliff; suspicious local farmers; threats from the nearby nuclear power station - and more horrifying evidence of the disease. But what is the cause? A deadly virus that has crossed the ...

In an Edinburgh hospital a young doctor dies in agony, trapped in a steam-filled steriliser. Three subsequent victims inexplicably bleed to death: lab technician Susan Daniels, little Timmy Watson who was recovering from his 'life-saving' operation, and an orderly who cut herself on a broken vase. All three are found to have had a powerful anticoagulant introduced into their blood. What madman is at work in the hospital? And why? Biochemist Tom Fenton begins his own investigations after stumbling on some of the young doctor's mysterious research. And when his girlfriend Jenny is accused of ...