Joseph T. McFadden writes from his forty-three-year experience as a neurosurgeon, most of this time in a large municipal hospital of a melting-pot American city. This reissue of his first novel, Hermes' Viper coincides remarkably with current media reports of harm done to patients and offers an inside view of vital interest to every person who would trust a family member to the medical system. His second novel, The Wafer, addressing the organ donor dilemma, and his book of short stories, Fulton's Monkey, are in the process of re-publication. A non-fiction work, Life in the Deadly World of Medicine, and two novels, A Hooker in the Choir, and The Burnt Offering are in press now. He is at work on his fifth novel, The DNA Rose, and a second collection of short stories. Virtual reality, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence and forensic psychiatry together reveal the fire-scarred and brilliant woman who has stalked her favorite doctor for sixteen years leaving a trail of deaths and flimsy evidence not quite adding up to murder. As she moves to eliminate everything still standing in her way, her victim tries to save her next targets from the fatal fire of her deadly derangement.