Award-winning novelist Audrey Gale pushes the envelope, abandons
tropes in new Depression-era medical thriller The Human
Trial" (Books Fluent, Sept. 26, 2023), author Audrey Gale merges three
genres: historical fiction, medical thriller and coming-of-age story, cast with
imperfect, relatable characters.
After an agonizing climb to earn his pathology specialty
from Harvard Medical, early discoveries in the microscopic realms threaten not
only Dr. Randall Archer’s hard-won place in the field of medicine, but his very
life.
Dr. Randall Archer has always been a misfit…
…in the brutal
blue-collar home where he grew up
…as a 16-year-old escaping to college, then medical school,
on a full scholarship to Harvard.
…in the highest echelons of Boston society, where the woman
he marries and the blueblood research partner with whom he shares his
laboratory belong
Even Archer’s brilliance as a pathologist catapults him into
direct and dangerous conflict with the medical establishment he fought so hard
to join. As the Great Depression presses down around him, Archer teeters at the
edge of a precipice. He must choose between his hard-won career and the sacred
oaths he took as a doctor and scientist—before all his choices are lost
forever.
.
“The Human Trial”
Audrey Gale | Sept. 26. 2023 | Books Fluent
Historical Medical Thriller / Suspense / Murder Mystery
Paperback | ISBN: 978-1-953865-70-0 | $16.99
Ebook | ISBN: 978-1-953865-71-7 | $7.99
Audiobook | ISBN: 978-1-953865-72-4 | Price TBD
About the Author
Audrey Gale long dreamed of being a writer, but never
anticipated the circuitous road she’d take to get there. After twenty-plus
years in the banking industry, she grew tired of corporate gamesmanship and
pursued her master’s in fiction writing at the University of Southern
California. Her first novel, a legal thriller entitled The Sausage Maker's
Daughters, was published under the name A.G.S. Johnson. The novel explores one
woman’s struggle to find her place amidst the upheaval of the radical 1960s.
Her second, The Human Trial, is the first book in a medical-thriller trilogy
inspired by Gale’s own experiences with the gap between traditional medicine
and approaches based on the findings of the great physicists of the 20th
Century, like Einstein and Bohr. Both The Sausage Maker’s Daughters and The
Human Trial incorporate Gale’s fascination with historical and scientific
research, and always with women finding their places. Gale lives in Los Angeles
with her husband and dogs where she is found hiking the Santa Monica Mountains
every chance she gets. For more, visit http://audreygaleauthor.com/.
Follow Audrey Gale on social media:Facebook: @audreygaleauthor | Instagram: @audreygaleauthor
An Interview with Audrey
Gale
Before we dive into everything else, tell us about the main
characters we meet in “The Human Trial.”
First is the pathologist, Dr. Randall Archer, with whom the
story opens. He’s from a brutal blue collar home, which he escapes at the age
of 16 by winning a scholarship to Harvard, which carries him through medical
school to a pathology specialty. Archer, standing out for all the wrong reasons
at Harvard, nevertheless collaborates with a blueblood physicist developing a
breakthrough microscope. It offers, Archer anticipates, many advantages over
others at the medical school. It also leads to Archer meeting another blueblood
whom, despite its unlikeliness, he marries.
His collaborator is Dr. Adam Wakefield, PhD Physics, whose
breakout microscope changes everything for the two men, not just in what they
are able to observe, but in the increasing risk they face as, inadvertently,
their findings challenge the very basis of western medical theory and practice.
Finally, Elizabeth Perrish, the sole daughter to the Brahmin
Perrishes who traced their history in Boston back to its founding, is a woman
ahead of her times, determined to do more than her high social ranking expects
of her. Her budding relationship with Archer is the final straw which causes
her to be cast from her family, penniless but undaunted, during the worsening
Depression.
Are Dr. Randall Archer and Dr. Adam Wakefield based on real
people?
While the two characters are inspired by real life
scientists, they are a figment of my imagination. I focused more on their
discoveries, which likely cost them both their lives, than on portraying the
men and their actual existences with accuracy.
How did you come up with the concept of this novel?
Soon after I arrived in Los Angeles, my Golden Retriever
became quite ill. I was advised multiple times to “put her down,” as 13 was a
very respectable age for a big dog. But I couldn’t without turning over every
stone first. I found a holistic vet who at our first meeting appeared to be
practicing magic, for lack of understanding. Luckily he was very forthcoming
about his medical treatments and the men upon whom they had been based.
But it was subsequently, when my dad, diagnosed with
leukemia and refusing a second chemo treatment, agreed to visit my vet with me
that I became hooked. The vet created a tape of sound vibrations that related
through stepped-down octaves to the rate of vibration of the microbes of
leukemia. It sounds like mumbo-jumbo, I know, but upon a routine follow-up with
his medical doctors, they declared his case to be the “damnedest case of
spontaneous remission they had ever witnessed!” My father did not die of
leukemia, but years later, of pneumonia.
Without giving too much away, can you give us a sneak
peek at what you have planned for the rest of the series?
I’ve extensively fleshed out the second installment in the
trilogy that commences with “The Human Trial.” In it, the suppression of the
science and fate of the scientists carries into the 1970s, another troubled
time in our history. Student activism had carried over from black power to
anti-war to feminism. Everyone had a cause which often gave participants
license to demonstrate, sit-in, walk-out, protest, and in a few cases, riot.
The Vietnam War was coming to a humiliating ending, and Nixon was about to leave
the White House, unceremoniously.
Against that backdrop, the next generation of Archers and
Wakefields find themselves caught up in dangerous circumstances which first,
they struggle to comprehend and then, struggle to survive.
Finally, as we ourselves struggled to cope with Covid-19,
its unprecedented deaths and shutdowns, it hit me: since the science of these
stories deals directly with viral disease, a current day story makes more than
perfect sense. It makes it necessary. All of these multigenerational
continuations also emphasize the long and successful suppression of life-saving
discoveries and their enormous costs in human life, both globally and down to
the very personal lives of the next generation to be caught up in it.
