Malcharist

A closely-observed, panoramic thriller about medical science gone wrong, and the people who make dangerous pills seem safe.

It's Manhattan in the winter of 2010, and Shivani Patel is carrying the secrets of a trade that no one understands: medical ghostwriting. A Cambridge-trained scientist and wordsmith for the world's largest drugmaker, she makes her soaring pay by delivering the sleight-of-hand needed to move new drugs into journals and onto market. Then she watches as a parade of aging males take credit for her work.

Halfway across the country, Griffin Wagner is slumming it in Minneapolis as a freelance reporter for In the Zone, a downmarket men's magazine and his lifeline in the collapse of print.

When fate leads both Shivani and Griffin to a problem with the world's favorite pill and the celebrity psychiatrist who promoted it, Shivani's powerful employers go to war with the three of them.

A wild ride at the intersection of science, belief and mass media, Malcharist is a globe-traveling debut about lonely jobs, the seduction of brain chemistry narratives in an age of industrial polypharmacy, and the troubling rise of indiscriminate violence in our time.