Meet Darden North
Darden North’s mystery and thriller novels have been awarded nationally, most notably an IPPY in Southern Fiction for Points of Origin. His fifth novel, The 5 Manners of Death, also follows Wiggle Room, Fresh Frozen, and House Call and was nominated for the 2018 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) Award in Fiction.
Party Favors
In Party Favors a financially struggling, young orthopedic surgeon on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is tempted to sell his patients’ leftover narcotics to save his drowning surgical practice, even hook new patients on opioids for financial gain. Local police work to connect his medical practice to a drug trafficking ring run by his secretary’s family. Written by a practicing physician, Party Favors was inspired by true stories of the rampant national and worldwide crisis of opioid and related drug abuse. The novel details complex characters, relationships, and situations that test the deepest moral and ethical codes.
The 5 Manners of Death
After a construction worker unearths a human skull on the campus of the University of Mississippi dating to the 1960s, an older woman’s desperate attempt to erase history counts down the five ways to die in the thriller, The 5 Manners of Death.
Wiggle Room
A captivating thriller set against the backdrop of the Iraqi War and the Deep South, Wiggle Room blends treachery and romance with murder. While serving as an Air Force trauma surgeon, Major Brad Cummins fails to save an injured American soldier yet must mend the Iraqi college student maimed in the same roadside blast. When Cummins saves the young man’s life, the doctor becomes a terrorist’s target.
Fresh Frozen
Someone wants to steal a movie star’s frozen embryos as boundaries blur between good and evil medicine and reality replaces science fiction. Under the eye of an Internet voyeur, a naïve policeman and his tormented wife discover that human reproductive tissue can become a fatal commodity.
Points of Origin
Set in a contemporary southern town, the death of patient Flowers Ridley costs Dr. Dan Foxworth his plastic surgery dynasty and his own life. While several families are consumed with retribution against the overly ambitious doctor, they are also after Cordell Pixler, the community’s conniving trial lawyer.
House Call
A police investigation into the murder of a young hospital nurse weaves through a southern community rife with self-indulgence, reverse sexual discrimination, cut-throat medical politics, and miserable souls.
