Lethal Control: A Doctor Nora Kelly Mystery

by Kate Scannell

A MYSTERIOUS BLUE PATIENT IS ABANDONED AT OAKLAND CITY HOSPITAL. Doctor Nora Kelly must outwit a powerful corporate adversary to diagnose her patient’s illness and safeguard her community.An anonymous blue patient is abandoned at the doorstep of Oakland City Hospital and cries out for her young daughter before passing out. Doctor Nora Kelly must struggle against the clock to diagnose her patient’s life-threatening illness and mysterious discoloration. The task becomes more difficult when the patient awakens but refuses to speak with anyone on staff, fearing reprisals from immigration and child-protection authorities.Nora suspects that her patient’s illness is caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, and she worries that others in the community may be endangered as well. But the patient remains silent. Only after learning that Nora saved her life does she agree to answer Nora’s burning questions—still, for a price. In return, Nora must deliver a confidential message to her daughter.Nora’s end of that bargain is the beginning of a perilous journey that leads to a homeless encampment at a decrepit local stadium site. With the help of her colleagues, she desperately searches for the daughter as she also discovers that other encampment residents have succumbed to toxic exposures. Her insistent attempts to prove the site’s environmental contamination come up against powerful systemic forces and trigger dangerous personal consequences.Editorial Reviews"Scannell lifts the veil on the life-and-death struggles taking place both inside and around the edges of an urban hospital. A fast-paced drama of overlapping lives, conflicting emotions, and the threats posed by immigration, human trafficking, and environmental degradation."--Leslie Larson, author of Breaking Out of Bedlam ~ "With Lethal Control, Kate Scannell crafts a mystery threaded with social activism and environmental justice.In present-day Oakland, California, Nora Kelly is a doctor in a community hospital. When a number of desperately ill homeless people are brought into her care, Kelly is pulled into a web of intrigue surrounding the redevelopment of a local stadium site where her patients camp.With the aid of her colleagues, Kelly investigates the site's potential contamination. As the novel races toward its conclusion, she uncovers a decades-old conspiracy that interweaves many of Oakland's most pressing social problems, including homelessness, environmental racism and gentrification.Scannell excels at characterization, bringing a vibrancy to individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, from debutantes to homeless individuals. For example, Red, who plays a critical role in the plot as a guard at the stadium site, displays a poignant tenderness beneath a rough demeanor shaped by his own years on the streets.The plot is taut and engaging... Scannell's authorial gaze is remarkably compassionate, especially to those who have been discarded by society at large. In addition to being an intriguing mystery, the novel is a cry for social activism..."--BlueInk Review ~Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5Lethal Control is a physician-led mystery with a strong social message...This series title includes characters from a previous volume; their introductions here are light, but their personalities are still made apparent...

453 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 3, 2021

About the author

Kate Scannell is a physician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has published extensively in professional and lay media. Between 2000 and 2014, she wrote a medical opinion column for several Bay Area newspapers and their digital outlets, including The Oakland Tribune, The Mercury News, and The East Bay Times. Her columns explored the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of American health care and medical practice.

Informed by her experiences as the medical director for one of the country's first hospital AIDS wards, she wrote the memoir Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic (Cleis Press, 1999). It recounts her coming-of-age as a female physician while caring for people with AIDS, most of whom would die, during the early epidemic years (1985-1990). Years after her memoir went out-of-print, it was reissued in electronic format (2010) and later resurrected into print (2012; and with photos, 2018).

Kate also wrote the novel Flood Stage, a collection of twenty interrelated stories about people living in a diverse rural community in Northern California whose lives are upturned while torrential rains overfill the local river. When flood stage arrives and apocalyptic flooding ensues, residents of this tight-knit community must make swift and painful decisions. In moments of urgent reckoning, their unique personal histories are acted out on center stage, while a universal human trauma unfolds.

In September 2018, Kate published Immortal Wounds: A Doctor Nora Kelly Mystery. This first-in-series mystery introduces us to crack diagnostician Dr. Nora Kelly and her colleagues at Oakland City Hospital. We begin a normal workday with Nora—as normal as it can be after the traumatic loss of her family two years ago. She steps into the ER, struggling with grief and self-doubt about her ability to continue practicing medicine. But there’s a corpse waiting in the administrative suite, and havoc quickly descends upon her and the hospital staff. Multiple colleagues die under suspicious circumstances. The mystery behind the mayhem draws Nora back into life and work, and her once-renowned diagnostic acumen resurrects under extreme peril. At the same time, her self-redemptive quest to solve the mystery unearths a deeply personal and painful question that reaches into the core of who she is and what she believes.

The second-in-series, Lethal Control, followed in 2021. Nora Kelly is stunned when an anonymous blue patient is abandoned at her ER. When other patients with baffling symptoms also appear, she begins to suspect environmental toxins as the cause. But to prove that and safeguard others in the community, she must outwit a powerful corporate adversary. Themes of environmental justice, homelessness, human trafficking, and immigration run through the mystery.

In the third book, Double Fault, (December, 2024), Nora is shocked and perplexed when she loses a young, healthy patient during a routine surgery at Oakland City Hospital. Though the cause of his death is unclear, Nora is blamed by his devastated and litigious parents, a hostile colleague with a covert agenda, and social media commentators who post demonizing videos of her. To survive the nightmare and redeem herself, she must solve the mystery of the puzzling death. The coroner’s report leads her to wonder if her patient had been receiving risky stem-cell injections, but to prove that she must navigate a messy entanglement with her estranged mentor. She must also break through the parents’ wall of secrecy to uncover their unwitting role in the tragedy. Drawing from her own experience of losing a child, Nora fits the puzzle pieces together to expose a complex scheme involving deceit, betrayal, stem cells, blackmail, bribery, and a college-admissions scandal.

Reviews

[michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read for lovers of Maisie Dobbs and Armand Gamache! The second installment of Kate Scannell's Nora Kelly series is a multi-layered thriller. The unputdownable tale takes Doctor Nora through a maze beginning at the intersection of health, corporate interests, toxic waste, and the needs of a community - but can she solve the mystery? Highly recommended!