An Excerpt From “Venoms” about the Vietnam Drug Trade
“If you were in charge, what would you do to end heroin use among the troops in Vietnam?”
He laughed. “Send everybody home. The rest will take care of itself.”
The Pitt Gets It Right
I watched the first season of The Pitt and await subsequent seasons on HULU. Having been a physician for many years I can attest that it’s on target, a great show, and a gritty hour-by-hour view of a busy urban emergency department. The medical care is accurate and current. However, it is more than a situational drama, the subtext is medical ethics. Every episode has elements of ethical dilemmas, which the cast must try to resolve in real time.
Sneak Peek At My Next Novel, “Death Lover”
Fortunately, mosquitos hadn’t returned yet. We had a week at most before they swarmed and drove everyone mad. Cruising along the canal in our power boat, a hundred yards in I spotted a skull on an embankment. Retrieving it required a tough scramble. The steep slope was created when the Army Corps of Engineers dug the channel. I lifted a mature adult skull. Yorik it was not. The sutures were closed, three worn intact teeth remained. Not a youngster for sure.
It’s Not Just Amazon
Which app is your favorite to discover and share your favorite author’s works?
Remembering The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Excerpt From “Camelot Lost”
“Can they make a deal with Khruschev and not precipitate a right-wing coup d’etat? The Kennedy’s know that militaristic chest pounding won’t cut it when you’re at the endgame.”
What Your Sweetheart Really Wants For Valentines Day
If your favorite book lover enjoys any of these, they will love the works of author Henry Rex Greene. Here are some of the titles you might prefer:
An Excerpt From “Brevity”
I have a notebook filled with the last words of the memorable and the memorable words of the forgotten. Mostly made up, of course, by others not so pressingly engaged. On various pages I have inserted my own last words and those of my old playmates, lovers, friends, and otherwise, so everyone dies talking.
“Is this in the play?” – A. Lincoln
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Another Excerpt from “Executive Justice” - Revised
What will happen in this contemporary novel pitting America’s red, blue, and neutral states against each other?
And is this a likely scenario or purely fiction?
Thinking About Drug History
“There are four interest groups that will make sure our efforts are frustrated: First, law enforcement. Drug laws are a make-work project for police. (The marijuana laws were written to provide work for unemployed alcohol enforcement officers during the Depression). Secondly, politicians need non-voting scapegoats. Third, banquet circuit scientists, who (for a price) provide rationalizations for anti-drug laws. Fourth, the drug cartels’ profit margin flows from the risk premium on contraband drugs.” [Meyers 1967]
Wishing You The Best This New Years
I hope each of you has a joyful, safe and happy start to 2026!
A Holiday Message To You All
Wishing each of you peace, joy and happiness this holiday season.
Another Excerpt From “Executive Justice”
At Trumps’ press conference he justified the invasion of Michigan using words like ‘provocation’ which don’t exist in his tiny vocabulary. He was especially harsh with Michigan’s governor, describing her in terms usually reserved for him, like “addled,” and “incompetent.”
“Stephen Miller wrote him a nice script. Evidently he doesn’t know how Germany started World War Two.”
An Excerpt From “Executive Justice”
In 2025, the blue states of America secede, dividing the former United States into three countries: the Confederation. the Coalition, and the neutral (white) states.
Retired physician Cal Boyd and his wife Carol travel to Orlando, Florida, located within the Confederation. They’re looking for her son Charley, a CIA officer assigned to track the extortion racket created by the Russian partners of the Confederation.
The couple soon find they need help dealing with the new government and its hostile police. To them it feels like a version of the post-Civil War South, blended with McCarthyism. Their quest gets them imprisoned for espionage.
Cal and Carol’s friends, led by Horace Bascom, plot to free them. They succeed in rescuing Carol, but can’t liberate Cal, who is sentenced to be shot as a traitor.
As events unfold, the invasion of the white states by the Confederation leads to a United Nations intervention. The Confederation is overthrown, but there is still a lingering question: Will Cal survive?
Another Excerpt from my newest, “Venoms”
In 1971, Max King is the new president of the Intern-Resident Association at LA County Hospital. A nurse there, Mary Francis, asks for his help following the mysterious disappearance of her husband, Mike, an infectious disease fellow and protégé of Franklin Delano Rousseau (FDR), a famous faculty member at USC who specializes in venomous snakes. Max agrees to help.
In this chapter, Max’s colleague tells him about the 1972 break-in at the Watergate Hotel, an effort by President Nixon’s campaign team to bug the phones at Democratic headquarters.
A Teaser of My Next Novel, Venoms
When asked to supervise the drug overdose service at his hospital, Max learns about heroin production in Thailand’s Golden Triangle. Wondering if this could be related to a colleague’s disappearance, Max contacts his former mentor on a summer project that researched heroin rehab.
an Excerpt From “Stone Mother”
The final installment of a medical trilogy, Stone Mother refers to the old Los Angeles County Hospital.
On entering residency training, a married couple carry their 1960s activism into the ‘70s. They struggle to balance overwhelming responsibilities with their ideals, attempting to reform the “system,” but ultimately it is their personal lives that suffer.
an Excerpt from “Thirteen Months a year”
Max and Jan King start their internships at LA county hospital at the end of the sixties. Max finds his way after four difficult years of medical school. Jan struggles with an abusive program. Max meets Abe Grant, an activist, the son of a communist and is drawn into far left politics. During the year conditions become untenable at the hospital. The young physicians on the internal medicine service hold a heal in protesting sub-standard care. In the end the establishment resident who chairs the Intern-Resident association co-opts them and wheedles a pay raise for everyone that takes the steam out of their activism. At the end of the year Max becomes chair of the activist group and learns that their pay raise came out of the hospital's clinical budget and has put them right back in the same mess.