Vera Mortina

When The Patient Is Not The Sick One! (Dangerous Doctors Series Book 3)

Fiction - Thriller - Medical
413 Pages
Reviewed on 11/20/2019
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Author Biography

Dimitri Markov is the writer’s name for DH Marks, a physician and writer of intense medical fiction on the theme of Dangerous Doctors. Markov gets his too-near-to-real-live material by observing others in the greater healthcare field for their actions, beliefs, hopes, fears and fantasies. Markov employs his lifetime of medical experience to explore the ill-defined boundary between medical fact and medical fiction. His Dangerous Doctors series of medical fiction includes: Vera Mortina, Her Charm Was Contagious, BloodBird, and The Surrogate. These works tell the (fictional) stories of good doctors, nurses and various health care providers, and doctors who are dangerous because of their faults : anger, jealousy, insecurity, greed, and mental illness. Dangerous to patients, dangerous to themselves, and certainly dangerous to those doctors and nurses they work with every day. Themes include in vitro fertilization, paranoia and insecurity of aging, commercialization of medical care, and the transplantation of consciousness. If you enjoy true-to-life medical fiction by Robin Cook, Michael Palmer, Patricia Cornwell, Carol Cassella, Kathy Reichs, and Arnaldur Indridason, and the writing style of Scott Turow, then you should be reading Dimitri Markov's Dangerous Doctors series. In that sense, it will probably be dangerous for you to relate to your own health care providers the same way again.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite

Vera Mortina: When the Patient is not the Sick One! is the third book in Dangerous Doctors Series by Dimitri Markov, a medical thriller featuring very strong characters and a cunning plot. Dr. Richard Bates is a committed and devoted doctor who puts the welfare of his patients above everything. But it has been only four months since Richard had a particularly worrisome accidental needle stick during an unusually messy cardiac resuscitation, and it was the second in eight months. He involves a third party to hire another doctor, and that is how Dr. Vera Mortina becomes his new partner. But something seems very wrong about Vera Mortina right from the start and Richard becomes increasingly worried about her weird behavior, the unexpected deaths of patients and staff. Richard quickly understands that his own life is at stake. Can he get rid of her before he becomes her next victim?

Dimitri Markov is one of my favorite authors when it comes to medical thrillers and I loved how the author brings out the hospital environment in the novel. The medical procedures seem well-researched and neatly written into the story. There are wonderful descriptions sprinkled throughout the story of places, characters, and scenarios. The conflict is strong and skillfully developed at a psychological level. The characters are sophisticated and multidimensional. I loved how Vera is developed, a character with a dubious background that wasn’t well investigated before hiring. The story is fast-paced and features characters with emotional depth. The writing is beautiful and enjoyable. When I read the first book in this series, I knew I'd want to read anything from this author, and this book doesn’t disappoint. It reads well as a standalone thriller. It is a great work of entertainment that explores the perils of medical practice when the wrong people are hired.

K.C. Finn

Vera Mortina: When The Patient Is Not The Sick One! is another dark medical thriller penned by author Dimitri Markov. Written for adults due to some graphic content and violent themes, this novel forms the third volume of the Dangerous Doctors Series, after The Surrogate. Here we meet Dr. Richard Bates, a successful and devoted physician. But when Richard’s practice is in dire need of help, a speedy and incompetent head hunter brings him Dr. Vera Mortina. Vera comes with a whole host of bad energy around her, odd personality quirks and, worst of all, a body trail. The closer Richard gets to figuring this mysterious figure out, the more endangered his own existence becomes.

As a cautionary tale on background checks and trusting one’s instincts, this is a psychological and terrifying true to life novel that will make you think twice about going to the doctor. Author Dimitri Markov turns his dark imagination towards another unique setting for his Dangerous Doctors series, and our world (as viewed through the eyes of the kind and somewhat naïve Richard) gets turned upside down by the arrival of Vera. She is a character who will be hard to forget, impactful on every page and highly atmospheric in her depiction and dialogue. What impressed me most was the novel’s sense of grim reality, despite its body count and suspicious circumstances. Overall, Vera Mortina is a big leap up in quality for this series and a true accomplishment for fans of medical thrillers and dark mysteries.

Rabia Tanveer

Vera Mortina: When The Patient Is Not The Sick One! is the third novel in the Dangerous Doctors Series by Dimitri Markov. Dr. Richard Bates isn’t doing so well. He has tried his best to save people and cure them of their diseases, but it seems that now he is losing the battle. He decides to add another doctor to his practice and hires the very impressive Dr. Vera Mortina to his team. On paper, she appears to be the perfect doctor, but the more time she spends in his facility the more suspicious he is about her. Soon patients are mysteriously dying and they all seem to have something to do with Dr. Vera. Now, it is up to Dr. Richard Bates to find out what is wrong with her and make sure that he survives this.

This is definitely a dark novel, one that will make you sit back, pause, and reconsider everything. The atmosphere of the story is richly created; it rises and falls with the pace of the story and allows the reader to get sucked into it. It is spine-chilling; I have no better word to describe it. It gave me a sense of doom and made me look over my shoulder one too many times. Psychological thrillers are often not executed well, there is something missing in them, but author Dimitri Markov has done a fantastic job. Dr. Richard Bates is the perfect protagonist, he silently observes things and makes sense of things at his own pace. Vera is simply disturbing, she is vile yet she is scarily relatable. There is something about her that makes her interesting. You want to look at her more closely, but you know that it would be dangerous. Reading this novel was a phenomenal experience. Fans of medical thriller/horror will love this book. Very entertaining and scary!