Another Five Patients

Melissa Franckowiak is an MFA student and a practicing anesthesiologist in Buffalo, NY. Her short fiction piece, The Very Pertinent News of Gabriel Vincent DeVil, recently placed in the 86th Annual Writer's Digest Literary Fiction Awards, and her work has appeared in Nanny Magazine, Parent Co., MothersAlwaysWrite.com, Blood Puddles ,Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, Ghost Parachute, and the anthology Children of Zeus, among other publications. She writes thrillers as Melissa Crickard. Melissa attended Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Buffalo, and after being awarded two Bachelor's degrees in Physical Therapy and Chemistry, she advanced toward her M.D. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Melissa is the mother of two children, the owner of a chatty Panama Amazon parrot, and a lover of all things outdoors.

Melissa Crickard's knowledge of medicine combined with inspiration from the 2014 Ebola outbreak bring a terrifying element of reality to this thrilling story. Her exploration of racial tension separates this novel from others in its genre and will cement it in your memory.

This suspenseful story of medical fiction traces foreign medical graduate Dr. Kip Paiva, an emigrant and survivor of human trafficking in post-apartheid South Africa. Her refuge from a Zulu militant captor comes to an end, as his brutal violence has finally tracked her across the ocean. While her past catches up to her, Dr. Paiva also becomes the scapegoat of a malpractice suit. Frightened for her and her son's lives, Dr. Paiva begins a journey fueled by bottomless resiliency and a mother's love. Her story intertwines through five others, all riveting, and all taking place in the busy Spectrum General Hospital in New York. Debut author Melissa Crickard uses this microcosm to illustrate larger aspects of modern medicine. Another Five Patients combines international intrigue and hospital politics with individual human stories involving hospital staff, patients, and their families. The result is a captivating, at times satirical, experience that reminds us that, whether doctor, mother, or child, we are all people, with flaws and emotions in a world of uncertainty.