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Cristina LePort is the author of the new novel Change of Heart, the second in her Miner & Mulville Medical Thriller series. She is a physician, and she lives in Orange County, California.
Q: Change of Heart is the second in your Miner & Mulville series--did you know from the start that you'd be writing a series?
A: Twenty years ago, when I started writing my first novel about Kirk Miner, private investigator, I was very excited about creating characters I wanted to meet.
At the time, I had difficulties in finding an agent and a publisher, so I started a second novel, keeping Kirk Miner, who had special medical knowledge (due to the events of the first novel).
Dissection, my first novel to be published, was born.
In Dissection, Kirk Miner works with a gruff and self-centered FBI agent, Jack Mulville, who became one of my favorite characters. I couldn’t let go of him in my next novel: Change of Heart.
The idea of a series developed little by little due to the fact that, as I spent so much time with my characters, they acquired a life of their own and I couldn’t bear letting them go. I hope they have the same effect on my readers.
Q: What inspired the plot of Change of Heart?
A: My first novel had a neurological background and required research to get all the medical details as accurate as possible. For the next two novels, I told myself: “I’m a cardiologist. Let’s stick to my field.”
For Change of Heart, I chose the background of heart transplants, in great part because one of my best friend (who inspired the character of a doctor in Dissection) is a heart transplant surgeon.
One of my friends told me that after reading Dissection she was ready to hire Bloom due to her great efficiency in helping Kirk and Mulville saving the world. I “hired” Bloom as the protagonist of Change of Heart.
Q: How do your experiences as a physician inform your novels?
A: When I started writing fiction, the background of my choice was the world I had inhabited and loved for 20-plus years: the medical world. I never had any questions or doubts about my genre: medical thrillers.
The medical world is an ideal backdrop for thrillers, for several reasons. It is bursting with life or death emergencies.
Several of the qualities defining a good doctor overlap with what makes a successful author, such as the ability to “read” people, meticulous work in confronting high-stakes situations, investigative talent, and the ability to integrate many clues into a meaningful sum.
No doubt, medicine and sleuthing have a lot in common: mystery, the pressure of time, and collection of evidence until the answer is found.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: Some knowledge about cardiovascular emergencies and fun from reading a fast-paced medical thriller with real inside authenticity. Most of all, I want the readers to see that heroes are normal human beings who keep on fighting to overcome impossible obstacles, despite their fears and limitations.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m getting ready for the 2025-2026 publication of books I wrote while trying to acquire an agent and a publisher: the first novel I wrote, Dying to Remember, prequel to Dissection (the story of how Kirk Miner acquired his strange medical knowledge), and a stand-alone medical-political thriller, Defrosted, about cryonics, due to be published in October, 2025.
I also have Do No Harm, another Miner and Mulville thriller and I’m presently writing the fifth book of the series, The Tiger and the Dragon.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m very grateful to all the readers who want to enter the world I created and meet my characters. I hope you’ll enjoy the thrilling ride as much as I enjoyed writing it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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