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A Simple Cure: Melanoma, Our Worst Nightmare by Lawrence Gold 

From a top reviewer: A Simple Cure is an “Intense, Riveting, Medical Thriller.” The novel engages the reader in the search for the cure of malignant melanoma, a cancer that kills one American every hour.

If you think for one moment that A Simple Cure by Lawrence W. Gold is going to be another run of the mill medical thriller straight from the same test tube as all the rest, you would be so wrong! First, I highly suggest you read what the author has to say in the beginning of the book, it’s fascinating and educational, because once you get to the first page of this fast-paced novel, you will be in for the ride of your life!

When nature, in her ultimate act of irony, strikes Richard Powell, a cancer specialist, with malignant melanoma, his wife, Terri devotes her life to curing the dreaded disease.
While publically supported research laboratories are characterized as noble in search of cures, and proprietary drug companies are caricatured as ruthless and materialistic, too often, the distinctions aren’t so clear.

When a drug courier is murdered to obtain an experimental and promising treatment for malignant melanoma, the act unleashes a chain of devastating consequences.  People for Alternative Treatment (PAT), a company created to find cures for rare diseases, had fallen on hard times and became a subsidiary of Kendall Pharmaceuticals, a company with very different set of values.

Experimentation with a vaccine against tuberculosis is showing surprising effects in controlling malignant melanoma at PAT and UC Medical Center. Kendall is enthralled with the economic potential of such a treatment in melanoma and in many other cancers while researchers are leery and have many unanswered questions.  Kendall’s determination to push the vaccine into clinical trial at all costs is in conflict with Terri and her ethical associates.

When clinical trials begin, the vaccine’s effects are miraculous. Soon, however, once again, we see the rule of unintended consequences.

About the author of the medical thriller, A Simple Cure: Lawrence W. Gold, M.D.

I was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, moved to Queens, and then, as New Yorkers say, we ascended to the Island.

First, Do No Harm was published in April 2007. No Cure for Murder was released in August 2011. For the Love of God was published in January 2012 and The Sixth Sense in July 2012.

In the last two years, I’ve written three screenplays based on my novels and hope to see one or more produced for the screen. I submitted my screenplay, Rage to the 80th Annual Writer’s Digest contest and won honorable mention (57 out of 11,000).

We live in beautiful Grass Valley with 13 year old Mike, a terrier mix and Bennie, a 7 year old purebred though enormous Yorkie.

Erickson’s novel has 191 reviews on Amazon with an average of 4.4 stars.

Pianist in a Bordello by Mike Erickson 

“What would happen if a politician decided to tell the truth—the whole truth?”

Richard Youngblood, aspiring Congressman, is about to find out. He’s running on a platform of honesty and transparency—and against the advice of his friends and advisers he’s decided to start with himself. His autobiography will lay his entire life bare before voters just days before the election.

And what a life he’s had. Born in a commune and named Richard Milhous Nixon Youngblood as an angry shot at his absent father, Richard grows up in the spotlight, the son of an enigmatic fugitive and the grandson of a Republican senator. He’s kidnapped and rescued, kicked out of college for a prank involving turkeys, arrested in Hawaii while trying to deliver secrets to the CIA…Dick Nixon Youngblood’s ready to tell all.

He’ll even tell his readers about the Amandas—three women who share a name but not much else, and who each have helped shape and define the man he’s become.

Are voters really ready for the whole truth?

Are you?

Pianist in a Bordello is a hilarious political romp through the last four decades of American history, from a narrator who is full of surprises.

About the author: Mike C. Erickson

Mike C. Erickson grew up in the idyllic college town of Logan, Utah, but because of a twist of fate he graduated from high school in Honolulu. He left Hawaii brimming with aloha and enrolled at Utah State, where he was awarded two degrees and self-proclaimed minor intellectual status, which was of dubious value when the US Army invited him to vacation in South-East Asia. Ten days after leaving Vietnam, Erickson began decades of dispensing pearls of wisdom as a high school history teacher, academic decathlon coach, and on occasion, as a community college instructor in the Sacramento area. Mike and his wife Trudy, have two grown sons and a grandson born soon after this novel is published. When not in Hawaii or another exotic locale, they live in Gold River, California. This is his first novel.

As of April 2015, the book is now the award winning novel, Pianist in a Bordello, having garnered a nod by the Northern California Publishers and Authors for third place in General Fiction. It was also awarded two first places in fiction and humor by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. In addition, Pianist was recently named as a recipient of the coveted BRAG awards. Publishers Weekly, Red City Reviews and Kirkus Reviews all included it in the top ten percent of Indie books that were submitted. The gold standard of book promotion, BookBub recently accepted Pianist in a Bordello for a featured position in their newsletter. BookBub only accepts between ten to fifteen percent of the hundreds of books submitted daily.