Bill Clem

Bill Clem is a registered nurse and thriller writer whose hospital experience informs fiction about outbreaks, medical institutions, and scientific risk. Microbe, published in 2007, begins with an oil rig off Delaware disturbing something the U.S. Army buried beneath the Atlantic decades earlier. As workers die from a rapidly changing illness, epidemiologist Justin Flannigan is drawn into an investigation involving the Centers for Disease Control and an old man who claims to know the contagion's origin. Clem spent more than two decades working in hospitals and medical facilities in Delaware and Maryland, and he has described writing early scenes between nursing shifts. Microbe belongs to a run of medical thrillers that also includes Skin Deep, Bliss, Immortal, Medicine Cup, and Replica. His professional background does not turn the novel into clinical reportage. Instead, it supplies the institutional setting and vocabulary for a plot-driven story about how practitioners respond when a disease evolves faster than established explanations.