David Bajo, author of the new mystery novel
Mercy 6 and director of the MFA program
at the University of South Carolina.
About the Author
David Bajo is the author of three novels: The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri (2008, Viking/Penguin), Panopticon (2010, Unbridled Books), and Mercy 6 (2014, Unbridled Books). He is a professor of creative writing at The University of South Carolina where he directs the MFA program. The tenth of15 children, David was raised on a ranch in San Diego, CA overlooking the Pacifi and the bullring in Tijuana, Mexico. His father was a professional baseball player and physician, his mother a nurse. He has worked as a writer his entire adult life, adding income as a journalist, translator, and professor. He received his fiction MFA from UC-Irvine and has taught creative writing and literature there, at Boise State, and at the University of South Carolina. His fiction has been translated into ten languages.
About His Work
In Mercy 6, David Bajo’s courageous new medical thriller, four people collapse dead in the same instant in four different places within a newly renovated Los Angeles hospital. After a quick examination, Dr. Anna Mendenhall, head of the ER and the first doctor to care for the patients, orders the entrances and exits to be sealed, believing the cause is contagion. With her is Mullich, the architect responsible for re-designing the hospital, which he had modeled for precisely this scenario: containment. Soon, however, Dr. Mendenhall, becomes suspicious that the cause of death is not a contagion.
As infectious disease specialists take over, she fears they will draw out the investigation—see what they want to see—and keep everyone locked in the hospital for an unnecessarily long time.
But it’s in the interests of the hospital administrators — and of the world at large — for people to think that it is. If the world knew the truth there could only be widespread panic. The hospital is immediately locked down. Information is suddenly being strictly controlled. Government troops encircle the hospital to enforce the quarantine, and other bodies arrive in ER.
What actually occurs, however, is more complex and unnerving than Mendenhall expects, as sinister outside agencies begin to get involved and medical concerns cease to be the primary concern. The farther her investigation goes, the more she understands that the forces around her want her contained, not because of her exposure to the patients, but because of what she suspects.
Working with an ally in Pathology and a colleague who is outside the hospital, Mendenhall develops her understanding that what has taken these lives has global implications … and whatever it is, it’s not a virus.
Mercy 6 is well researched and only slightly speculative—which makes this understated and cutting-edge medical thriller as chilling as it is suspenseful.
The considerable praise for Bajo’s first novel, The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, and second novel, Panopticon, included these comments:
Bajo has crafted an intellectual thriller for a literate audience.
–Los Angeles Times
It’s engrossing stuff, there’s no question. Bajo uses words and equations to the point of poetry.
–Los Angeles Times
Think of it as Eastern European beach reading: a sexy book that’s about everything, yet above all about the act (Act? Art!) of reading itself.
–Minneapolis Star Tribune
David Bajo’s Panopticon is an ethereal, well-crafted, and quietly disturbing novel, a book that slices creepily through its characters’ pasts to uncover aspects of a technologically warped present that are equally riveting and unnerving because of their pervasiveness.
–The Brooklyn Rail
Bajo now returns with Panopticon, an eerie mystery about the illicit thrill of grassroots surveillance.
–The Globe and Mail
These are fantastic tales of shape shifting, of devils in the guise of well-dressed men, and other bogeyman fare.
– American Book Review