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SUMMARY OF THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

When a Southern Missouri hardscrabble farmer unwittingly poisons aquifers in the 1970’s, his original sins in three decades awaken, killing him and his neighbors in 2003, ripping local business, inciting mass hysteria, igniting culture clashes, feeding a farmers’ urban riot and threatening to destroy his son’s career.

In my 135,000 word mainstream novel, THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA, radioactive and toxic well water randomly murders a dozen, and sickens hundreds more near Joplin. A world renowned Harvard Medical School grad discovers that, years before his birth during Nixon’s presidency, Chicago-based corporate thugs toss cash bundles to his duped destitute dad for guiding them through terrifying sink hole swamps late at night. They drop corrosion-doomed industrial waste canisters, followed by dynamite chasers, down abandoned lead mine shafts, circumventing the Clean Water Act of 1972, evading the newly formed EPA, raising the specter, “Is blood thicker than toxic water?”

Google the three terms “James Lewis Tylenol” without the quotes. For 27 years, the press globally describe me as the Prime Suspect in the still-unsolved, seven Chicago-area Tylenol murders in 1982. My core reader market may include a fraction of the millions titillated by this bizarre urban scapegoat myth about me. Adopted as an only child in 1947, I grow up barefooted, without electricity, while working horses and mules on a tiny rocky Missouri farm surrounded by abandoned lead mines and 10-story, mile-long chat piles. In 2000, I graduate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

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