Ken McClure at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 13/07/2007

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Ken McClure - Page 1

25 Jun 07

WebPage: http://www.KenMcClure.com

About the Author

Bibliography

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2007)

The Lazarus Strain
Do you believe everything you are told?
When an apparent animal rights stunt sends shockwaves from the quiet English countryside to the corridors of Whitehall, Sci-Med, an elite investigative agency, sends Dr Steven Dunbar to uncover the truth. However, as a series of brutal incidents lays siege to the unassuming villagers, it is clear that even those held responsible are unable to explain the events or predict what is yet to come. Encountering even more frightening security measures enforced by unknown authorities, Dunbar realises that those who might hold the keys to the mystery are not prepared to help him, and those who have unleashed it will stop at nothing to fulfil their apocalyptic ambitions.
As our most sophisticated means of protection are shown to be useless, the ex-Special Forces medic is tested to the limit. Alone in a race against unspeakable tragedy, he must imagine the unthinkable - and all he knows is that, when the storm breaks, it’ll already be too late…
'Scotland's very own Michael Crichton' Aberdeen Evening Express 'McClure's forte is to take an outside medical possibility, decide on the worst possible outcome… and write a book' The Scotsman
'Well-wrought, plausible and unnerving' The Times

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2007)

Past Lives
When successful neurosurgeon John MacAndrew performs a routine operation to remove a tumour, the patient undergoes a severe personality change post-surgery. Hartman's Tumour is diagnosed, a rare condition which leaves its victims deranged and destined to be confined to mental institutions. There is no option but to have the patient committed. The patient's husband blames MacAndrew for the dreadful outcome and sets about to ruin his career. With an uncertain future ahead of him, MacAndrew retreats to his native Scotland to lick his wounds and it there that he makes further discoveries about the mysterious illness and the chemical that induced it. The damage wrought by the chemical affects the brain cells that normally block out a person's memory of past lives, with the result of the appearance of multiple personality disorder in sufferers. Armed with this knowledge, MacAndrew thinks he may be able to save his patient, until he discovers someone is deliberately using the chemical to regress selected individuals and gain eyewitness accounts of events in the past.

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2005)

Eye of the Raven
Dr Steven Dunbar works for Sci-Med Inspectorate, a secretive agency that investigates crimes with links to the world of science. He is therefore bemused when the deathbed confession of a convicted psychopath lands on his desk. But it emerges that another man is already serving a life sentence for the brutal rape and murder of thirteen-year old Julie Summers - a man whose medical research once sent shockwaves through the scientific community. Dr David Little. Little is nine years into his life sentence. The evidence against him was indisputable: a perfect DNA match. When Dunbar is sent to Edinburgh to confirm the deathbed confession as a hoax, amongst the confusion, incompetency and deception that he encounters there, a new fear arises: what if the confession is true? A case that has already destroyed so many lives is forced to reopen. Dunbar is determined to discover the truth, even if it is finally revealed to be more horrific than anyone could have imagined...

First British Edition Allison & Busby (2004)

The Gulf Conspiracy
Gulf War Syndrome - Fact or Fiction?
Saudi Arabia, 1991. Troops stationed at the Dhahran airbase are in a state of high alert. The chemical warfare detectors have sounded and the soldiers scramble to put on their protective suits. They sit in tense silence, reminding themselves of the vaccinations which will protect them from biological weapons. Then the all-clear sounds, and the troops rejoice that they are unharmed - or so they think…
England, 2002. Those same troops are getting ill. Their families are getting ill. Young ex-soldiers are dying from mysterious and varied diseases. And the survivors are angry. Steven Dunbar, a medical investigator with an elite Government agency, decides to probe further. But what he discovers shocks him to the core. For the deadliest threat of all lurks not in the Saudi oilfields or in Iraq, but in the plush boardrooms of Whitehall. And if something isn't done soon, then more innocent people will die.

First British Edition Simon & Schuster (2002)

Wildcard
Steven Dunbar's latest and most deadly case... When a killer virus appears, there are no obvious connections between the victims. The solution is unbelievable, yet all-too-possible When a traveller dies on a flight back to London from Africa, bleeding profusely, the Ebola virus is blamed. Steven Dunbar of the Sci-Med Directorate investigates and discovers that this outbreak cannot be blamed on Ebola, and that others, completely unrelated to the first victim, are falling ill and dying. Somewhere there is a link. Somehow the wild cards are related. As more and more people fall ill and die throughout the British Isles in the run-up to Christmas, politicians equivocate and scientists attempt to find a seemingly impossible answer. Steven questions his own belief in medicine and in his role as a doctor. Gradually, the truth becomes clearer... it is terrifying and unbelievable.

About The Author
Ken McClure was born and brought up in Edinburgh where he enjoyed a childhood playing happily on the banks of the Union Canal during the fifties. He went to Craiglockhart Primary School where one of his teachers was Norman MacCaig, a man who was to become a Scottish literary giant in later years and whom Ken says introduced him to sarcasm! He then went on to Boroughmuir High School where, through another quirk of fate, his English teacher was yet another of Scotland’s great literary figures, Sorley Maclean, a gentle man whom he remembers with great fondness.
When the time came to leave school he thought that he’d like to be an engineer in the Merchant Navy – having noticed that engineers on all vessels from Clyde puffers to the Starship Enterprise were always honest, dependable Scotsmen. He also liked the idea of walking into bars in far-flung Bombay with his cap at a jaunty angle. Christian Salvesen gave him a cadetship to study marine engineering in Glasgow where he was to discover that a school background of being good at English literature and Latin and Greek was perhaps not the best preparation for a career in engineering. After a year he decided that this was not really the path for him to follow – a decision aided by the knowledge that on completion of his studies he would be sent to Salvesen’s base on South Georgia Island in the Antarctic for at least eighteen months!
There followed a year or so when he made his living as a guitarist, playing lead guitar with several pop groups and touring with a small jazz combo before parental pressure made him look for a ‘proper’ job. He became a very junior lab technician at the Edinburgh City Hospital where he was to meet Dr Archie Wallace, the consultant bacteriologist who was to have a major influence on him and remain a friend until he died. Described by Ken as the finest person he ever met, Archie Wallace persuaded him that he should be ‘all he could be in life’ and he set out on a course of self education through night school - eight nights a week as he remembers. This was to lead on to study as an external postgraduate student of the Open University seconded to Edinburgh University where he gained a PhD in molecular genetics. A paper based on his thesis was to win him the Difco Triennial Prize for research in microbiology in 1980.
He became a researcher with the Medical Research Council in a small unit at Edinburgh University, a career which subsequently was to take him all over the world as a visiting researcher at universities and medical schools. His specialist field was the genetics of cell division in bacteria, particularly E. coli. During the course of this work he was to discover a new cell division gene, ftsK, which was subsequently named after him. The ‘K’ stands for Ken.
It was after a particularly adventure-strewn research trip to the University of Tel-Aviv in Israel that he took up writing. Not surprisingly he wrote a thriller (The Scorpion’s Advance) about a medical researcher following a trail which leads him to Israel, using locations that he had first-hand experience of. He maintains that from the time he put pen to paper he knew that this was something he really wanted to do and hasn’t stopped since. The first McClure book to be published, Pestilence, reached over a million readers and today his books are available in over twenty languages across the world.
Although his early books were the product of pure fantasy, he has tended with later ones to base his stories on little known medical or scientific facts so that they have an element of reality and closeness to home that adds greatly to the thriller element of them. This technique has been described by one newspaper as ‘taking an outside chance medical possibility, deciding on the worst possible outcome and writing a book.’. On a couple of occasions however, Ken McClure’s ‘outside chances’ have come tragically true. An early book, Crisis, dealing with the mutation of a little-known sheep brain disease, Scrapie, to cause brain disease in humans was to happen in real life but through an intermediary vector in the form of mad cow disease. The outbreak a few years ago of the condition known as necrotising fasciitis was also pre-empted in his thriller, Chameleon.
Ken became a full-time writer at the end of 2000 but still keeps up to date with relevant medical journals, always on the lookout for his trademark ‘outside possibilities’.

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Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

The Lazarus Strain (Allison & Busby, 2007) Jun 07

Past Lives (Allison & Busby, 2007)

Eye of the Raven (Allison & Busby, 2005)

The Gulf Conspiracy (Allison & Busby, 2004)

Wildcard (Simon & Schuster, 2002)

Deception ( 2001) Simon & Schuster Nov 01 Pocket Books Pbk Jul 02

Tangled Web (Simon & Schuster, 2000) Pocket Books Pbk May 01

Resurrection (Simon & Schuster, 1999) Pocket Books Pbk Mar 00

Donor (Simon & Schuster, 1998) Pocket Books Pbk 1999

Pandora's Helix (Simon & Schuster, 1997) Pocket Books Pbk 1998

Trauma (Simon & Schuster, 1995) Pocket Books Pbk 1996

Chameleon (Simon & Schuster, 1994)

Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 1993) Pocket Books Pbk 1994

Requiem (Simon & Schuster, 1992)

Pestilence (Simon & Schuster, 1991)

Fenton's Winter (Fontana, 1989) Pocket Books Pbk 1997

The Scorpion's Advance (Fontana, 1986) Pocket Books Pbk 1998