Laura Cody & Graham Elder – Call Game

Laura Cody – When the school literary magazine published my poem “Spiderwebs,” an exploration of stimulus-reaction psychology in one tight verse (…”Once I saw one by the stream, when I saw it I began to scream”…) Nurturing my interests in both the written word and the complexities of the mind, I proceeded to study English at the University of Notre Dame, then attend medical school at McGill University. These pursuits combined to provide exposure to a world of fascinating conditions as well as the vocabulary with which to describe them. (Imagine what I could have done with “Spiderwebs” had I known the word “arachnophobia” when I was eight?) After four years in Montreal, I came home to New York City and completed a residency in Psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center followed by a fellowship in Forensic Psychiatry at Cornell and Columbia. I currently practice in New York and, in case you are wondering, yes, my life is exactly like something out of the show Law and Order. 

Writing has continued around the edges of my career with publications in professional journals and some dabbling in fiction writing. The fiction-dabbling ramped up several notches in 2015 when I teamed up with my old med-school friend, orthopedic surgeon Graham Elder, to write The Epsilon Project, a series of books following five childhood friends dealing with the aftermath of a cataclysmic solar event. You could say we drew upon our specific areas of expertise to create a tension-filled, blood-streaked thriller of a story. (I really hope that someone, someday, says that.)

I live on Long Island with my wonderful husband and three amazing children. In my spare time, I can usually be found trotting around the neighborhood in running shoes, sautéing something on the stove, or sitting on my porch, glass of wine at my side, tapping on a keyboard while the sun sets or the rain falls.

Graham Elder – A suspenseful campfire story with kids on the edge of their seats. A story in the operating room to pass the time while closing an incision (remember Hawkeye from MASH?). A story at the dinner table with the family gathered or maybe a story out on the deck with my wife, Andrea, watching the sunset with a perfect glass of wine. Most of all though, it was the bedtime stories gently nudging my children, Emily and Charlie, off to sleep. These stories slowly morphed into a series of middle-grade illustrated books, and that’s when I really got the writing bug! 

I was born in Montreal and attended McGill University for thirteen years, completing degrees in Physiotherapy, Medicine and Orthopaedic Surgery. I joined the military (Naval Reserves) when I was 17 and very much enjoyed having a good chunk of my education (not to mention many exhilarating adventures on the high seas) paid for by the Canadian government. I now live with my wife and two kids in the small town of Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Ontario, cresting the shorelines of beautiful Lake Superior, where I run a busy surgical and academic practice with writing time divided between scientific publications and novels.

In 2015, I joined forces with my longtime medical school friend Laura Cody and TwoDocsWriting was born. A forensic psychiatrist writing with an orthopaedic surgeon, what devilish harm could come of that? It turns out that a lot of our characters would meet violently gory and psychologically disturbing deaths! No surprise. What else would you expect?

Visit: twodocswriting.com

CALL GAME

Chief orthopedic resident, Dr. Rylan Fraser, knows she’s in for a bad on-call night when she arrives in the trauma bay to find a young father barely holding on after a major motorcycle accident. It’s the eve of Thanksgiving, so staffing is thin, but things slide further downhill when she learns her junior resident is AWOL and the blizzard raging outside has stranded her supervising attending in a roadside ditch. This means she must fly solo, breaking the established chain-of-command to perform a series of emergency operations she is almost-but-not-entirely qualified to do on her own. Just when she thinks things can’t get any worse, they do. In between surgeries, Rylan is summoned to the ward to check on her post-op patients—only to find one after the other dead in their beds.

With stress levels skyrocketing, Rylan teams up with the friendly (and handsome) on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Bennet, to puzzle out what’s happening. Nothing is quite what it seems, though. As the night unfolds, Rylan and Paul are pulled deeper and deeper into a sick cat and mouse game in which their very own lives hang in the balance.

I give Call Game a solid 5 star review.

owl eyes