Feb. 10, 2024: Check out the Best Medical Thriller Books of The 21st Century — including “The Forever Game” by Jeffrey James Higgins, host of our new Inkandescent Radio + TV show, Elaine’s Literary Salon

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Monday Morning Magic from Inkandescent® PR + Publishing Co. What fun to see our friend Jefferey James Higgins top the list of The Best Medical Thriller Books of The 21st Century.

“The best medical thriller books of the 21st Century range from conspiracies about terrifying places where shocking research is carried out, to period pieces about the horrors of mental institutions,” explain the editors who made the picks at Elsewhere, technology threatens to take something that seems like a cure and turn it into something positively lethal. Fertility treatments are invented to save humanity, only to go horribly awry. And don’t forget what may be the most common theme in this genre: the evil done by big pharma.”

Best Medical Thriller BooksThey ask an important question: Why do we even read medical thrillers? After all, depending on what pandemic or plague is going around, it can seem at times like we’re all living in our own medical nightmare. “Maybe that’s why a truly great medical thriller book, one that enables us to escape to a world where the worst-case scenario is worse than our own, can be oddly therapeutic,” they explain, noting the represented authors are real-life medical doctors, scientists, first-time novelists who are passionate about government corruption, and one of the most legendary writers of our time.

Click here to check out the full list of the best medical thrillers of this century,including Stephen King’s “The Institution,” and “The Beauty Doctor” by Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard.

Our Inkandescent favorite on the list is Jeffrey James Higgins’ The Forever Game. Not only is this book packed with intrigue, he knows deeply of what he speaks. As a retired supervisory special agent, “I have wrestled a suicide bomber, fought the Taliban in combat, and chased terrorists across five continents,” says the writer who received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Heroism and the DEA Award of Valor.

When he’s not battling crime or penning an award-winning tome, Jeffrey manages Elaine’s, the popular modern Mediterranean restaurant he and his wife own in Northern VA. In addition to serving delicious dishes, upstairs at Elaine’s is a cozy library that is home to regular Literary Events where Jeffrey interviews nearly a dozen authors monthly.

New this month: Those Q&As are produced on Elaine’s Literary Salon — our new show on InkandescentRadio and Inkandescent.tv. Check out Ep1 with Jeff Markowitz, author of “The Other.”

Click here to see whose book we’ll be reading next at Elaine’s!

Until next Monday: Scroll down to learn more about The Forever Game, and we’ll look forward you soon at Elaine’s. — Hope Katz Gibbs, founder and president, Inkandescent® Inc. Inkandescent.us

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About The Forever Game, by Jeffrey James Higgins

Here’s the story: Special Agent Adam Locke quits DEA and joins his brother’s artificial intelligence company so he can care for his dying girlfriend, but when his brother is killed in a suspicious accident, Adam discovers life-saving technology can be also deadly. Being a special agent meant everything to Adam, but when his girlfriend is diagnosed with cancer, he resigns to be closer to home. He takes a job at his brother’s AI start-up and works for an eccentric billionaire on Cuttyhunk Island, a tiny community near Cape Cod.

Forever Technology promises artificial intelligence will extend life, but after a scientist falls off a cliff and Adam’s brother dies in an explosion, Adam believes someone is killing to protect the priceless innovation. The clock is ticking as Adam fights to use the technology to save his girlfriend and to prove his brother was murdered before the killer can escape with the world’s most valuable scientific discovery.

The Forever Game examines the philosophical issues that arise when artificial intelligence can cure disease, download minds, and offer eternal life. It explores the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

What Mark Greaney #1 NYT Bestselling Author of The Chaos Agent and a Gray Man Novel says:  The Forever Game by Jeffrey James Higgins is a tautly-plotted thriller bursting with both action and depth. Higgins himself has ‘been there and done that,’ and this experience reveals itself on every page. I’ve no doubt readers will be hungry for more adventures from Adam Locke.”

What says: DEA Special Agent Adam Locke is a series-worthy action hero whose debut is filled with breathtaking action and a surprisingly exquisite exploration of AI-assisted immortality. The Forever Game opens as DEA Special Agent Adam Locke is in Haiti, closing in on John Laguerre, the leader of a massive transnational criminal organization. He figures they’ve got just one chance to “cut the head off the snake.”

After an exhilarating infiltration into Laguerre’s compound, they manage to take him alive. Locke may be a legend within the DEA, but he soon gives it all up to take care of his dying girlfriend, Effie. To stay close to home while covering expenses, he agrees to take a job at his brother Tommy’s company, Forever Technology. What started as research to understand and access memory in damaged brain tissue is an AI-powered effort to extend human life.

As author Jeffrey James Higgins soon reveals, the problem with Forever Technology is that people may be willing to kill to get their hands on it. After a scientist dies under suspicious circumstances and Tommy dies in an explosion, Adam finds himself on the suspect list while trying to find the killers.

Higgins, author of Furious and Unseen, bolsters his reputation for high-stakes, no-frills drama with this taut thriller. There isn’t an ounce of fat on Higgins’ prose. Nearly every line of dialogue is a gut punch, and yet he can make a landscape come alive with a single high-impact sentence (“The pier was a mishmash of pulleys and taught metal lines, and it smelled of diesel fumes and saltwater.”)

Whether Forever Technology can save Effie is at the forefront of the plot, but Locke is so likable, and so on the ropes, that his day-to-day fight for survival is what makes this a page-turner. There’s no indication yet that Higgins is planning a series, but we would love to see one centered around Locke. As it stands, what separates Locke from the Jack Reachers of the literary landscape is his hearty, seemingly natural exploration into deeper themes. In this case, it’s nothing less than the future of immortality.

Click here to buy the book.