Tampered by Ross Pennie (Cover)

TAMPERED was inspired by an alleged, real-life medical crime that shocked the city of Hamilton, yet went unpunished. Someone is murdering the lively seniors enjoying the high life in the city’s most iconic mansion. Perhaps this time someone will catch the perps and bring them to justice. Or maybe not. There’s only so much I can do as a vigilante author.

TAINTED, Zol and Hamish’s first adventure, had readers nervously searching their grocery carts for poisoned comestibles. TAMPERED will have you terrified next time you leave your doctor’s office, especially since I didn’t have to make much up. It really happened. More or less.

Here’s what TAMPERED’s jacket has to say:

Dr. Zol Szabo chose public health for its noble ideals and predictable hours. He never expected to be intimidated by the Prime Minister’s Office, roughed up by the RCMP, or threatened by the Hamilton mob.

Though Zol and his team have investigated every centimetre of Camelot Lodge, a residence for healthy seniors blessed with generous pensions and high-ranking political connections, the source of the converted mansion’s spate of fatal food poisonings remains elusive. As the death count rises, the outbreak threatens Zol’s beloved grandfather Art Greenwood, a military veteran, engineering genius, and piano whiz. The Mounties muscle in, and Zol’s boss threatens him with exile. Hamish Wakefield, Zol’s friend and colleague obsessed with microbes and car washes, discovers dangers at the Lodge that make the rabid bats in the turret and the Dumpster-diving cook seem like minor indiscretions.

It takes Art Greenwood, marshalling the insights of his silver-haired companions, to expose the deaths for what they are: a string of murders.

Tainted, by Ross Pennie

TAINTED was awarded the 2010 Arts Hamilton Literary Prize for fiction!

This is what Tess Gerritsen, New York Times-bestselling author of a dozen medical thrillers, including THE SURGEON, THE KEEPSAKE, and ICE COLD says about TAINTED:

“Fascinating and fast-paced, a medical thriller with the high-stakes tension of a frightening epidemic. Ross Pennie knows how to weave real science with crackling suspense”

A TAINTED teaser:

Dr. Zol Szabo gazes across the Niagara Escarpment, his fingers crossed. Three citizens on ice in the university’s morgue, mad-cow prions riddling their brains — it must be just a cruel coincidence. If not, Zol’s patch of the province’s public-health map is a disaster about to explode onto grocery-store shelves and newspaper headlines. Within a week, infectious-diseases guru Hamish Wakefield — Zol’s eccentric friend and former classmate — confirms more human mad-cow deaths creating a pattern of disease never seen before. A consultant from Toronto, spoiling for a fight, hijacks the investigation and plunges the country into gastronomic chaos. The race to discover the source of the  suspiciously aggressive prions tainting the food supply brings Zol face to face with forces darker and more personal than he ever bargained for.

The Unforgiving Tides

“A National Geographic extravaganza… descriptions are vivid… characters alive… as though you are by his side as he comforts mothers camped out with their entire families beneath their children’s hospital beds.”
Canadian Family Physician

The Unforgiving Tides is the true story of Dr. Ross Pennie’s two-year posting as a medical volunteer on a remote island in the South Pacific.

He sets off at age 25 with his diploma’s ink barely dry and his heart afire with tales of the South Seas, Captain Cook, Robinson Crusoe, the Bounty. The moment he arrives at Catholic Mission Vunapope in Papua New Guinea, he draws the ire and suspicion of Sister Pirmina, the sharp-toothed nun who rules the hospital: he misinterprets the administration of the Last Rites as a Catholic code for “Do Not Resuscitate” and nearly allows a local hero to die. For the next 2 years, the young Dr. Pennie, re-christened Dokta, struggles as much against his own inadequacies as with the medical crises presented to him.

His treatment of Lillianna, a small child suffering from diarrhea and dehydration, goes horribly wrong. Was the girl poisoned with bush medicine or has he missed something obvious?

He faces amputating a woman’s mangled leg with little more than a hacksaw and the knowledge that the closest he’s ever come to witnessing the procedure is a Hollywood movie.

An earthquake rocks the operating theatre in the middle of delicate surgery. A mysterious epidemic threatens hospital staff. People keep turning up poisoned. A fatal form of childhood malnutrition must be overcome in the face of poverty, ignorance, indifference and tradition.