Tess Gerritsen

Internationally best-selling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Gerritsen went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her MD. While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, Adrift, which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Gerritsen's first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on The New York Times bestseller list. Her suspense novels have since been: Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999), The Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner (2003), Body Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club (2006), and The Bone Garden (2007). Her books have been translated into 31 languages, and more than 15 million copies have been sold around the world.

As well as being a New York Times best-selling author, Gerritsen has also been a #1 bestseller in Germany and the UK. She has won the Nero Wolfe Award for Vanish and the Rita Award for The Surgeon. Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publisher Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen.”

Now retired from medicine, she writes full time and lives in Maine.