Showing results by author "Ross Pennie" in All Categories

When a bout of food poisoning strikes a residence for lively seniors blessed with generous pensions and high-ranking political connections, Dr. Zol Szabo, public health doctor turned medical detective, assembles his investigative team. But the epidemic’s source proves elusive; the death count rises and when the scourge threatens someone close to Zol, he calls in his friend and colleague Hamish Wakefield, a microbe connoisseur with a nose for exotic diagnoses.

When incidents of food supply contamination dominate the news media, two investigators - Zol Szabo, a public health doctor, and Hamish Wakefield, a young infectious diseases specialist - come under immense pressure to find the cause of a mysterious epidemic before more victims show up on the autopsy table. In a race against the clock, the two doctors must navigate the treacherous political minefields of the medical community and the media while the disease spreads.

Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo hopes an extended cruise on the Indian Ocean with his girlfriend and his son will salve the wounds of the rough times they’ve been weathering at home. As they set sail coddled in unaccustomed luxury on the Coral Dynasty, things below deck are a little less sunny for the ship’s physician.

Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo and his team are called to a panic-stricken high school in the heart of Ontario’s tobacco country, where teens are dying from liver failure. The team suspects a link with contaminated, cut-price cigarettes manufactured on nearby Grand Basin Indian Reserve. When Zol confronts The Badger, the multi-millionaire kingpin of the illicit Native tobacco trade, he is ordered to shut down his investigation when rebuffed by high-level government authorities.

After weeks of torture at the hands of Syria’s secret police, the bombing of his villa in the ancient city of Aleppo, and the murder of his daughter, trauma surgeon Dr. Hosam Khousa flees his fractured homeland with his wife and son. They make their way to Canada as refugees, where Hosam is forced to trade his prestigious scalpel for a barber’s humble clippers. Though he aches to regain his once-prominent surgical career, cutting hair in Hamilton, Ontario, seems a safe way to make a living, until a fellow Syrian is slashed to death in the barbershop.