Millicent Eidson – Ladies of Mystery

Three years since my initial guest blog in 2022 (https://ladiesofmystery.com/?s=eidson), my microbial mystery world has expanded to multiple disease threats worldwide. It’s a good time to catch everyone up.

For decades, I was immersed in zoonotic diseases transmitted from animals. Scientists estimate that three-quarters of new or emerging infections are zoonoses.

As a veterinarian working in public health, I dropped smelly baits from a helicopter over the Adirondacks to vaccinate raccoons against rabies. I tracked down people with explosive diarrhea from a scenic New Mexico train ride. I coordinated reporting and collection of dead birds when West Nile virus showed up in the western hemisphere.

Serious illnesses and deaths are tragic but stamping out disease outbreaks is exciting. Each cluster of ill people is a mystery for a disease detective. Everyone knows about Rizzoli and Isles from the wonderful Tess Gerritsen thrillers. But veterinarians exposed to deadly hantavirus when collecting infected mice are less familiar medical heroes.

When I retired from fulltime work as a veterinary epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and two state health departments, I continued part-time teaching about zoonoses to graduate students. It’s rewarding to open up the eyes of new public health practitioners to the fascinating world of zoonoses. But I wondered if I could do the same for the general public.

Our daughter is adopted from China like thousands of orphans with the one-child policy. In my fiction, I wanted to explore how it might feel for someone whose Asian role models are replaced by Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cultures embedded in a rich landscape.

And many of us struggle with mental and physical health challenges from birth, injury, or illness. Can someone wrestling with that history contribute fully to our demanding, fast-paced world?

So Maya Maguire was born, inspired by my daughter’s heritage and my own with mostly Irish ancestors. Like me, Maya Maguire starts her public health career after completing years of work toward veterinary and master’s degrees. Unlike me, she’s a bit of a genius and completes all her training young, adding further stress when expected to perform at the level of other more mature CDC trainees.

The initial three novels primarily immerse us in Maya’s world, other than diary excerpts from a mysterious young boy facing his own roadblocks near the Arizona/Utah border. In “Anthracis,” Maya is in her first year of training as a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer stationed in New Mexico. Along with veterinary and physician colleagues, she battles perplexing new means of anthrax infection in the Southwest.

Her second year of EIS training still finds Maya in the Southwest, tackling tick-borne Borrelia infections across Arizona and New Mexico. Then she joins a colleague based in Norway on outbreaks in multiple European countries and north Africa. Personal relationships are impossible to balance with her work obligations.

In “Corona,” Maya experiences the COVID-19 outbreak along with all of us, first in Arizona, then in Denmark with infected mink, and finally in her home country of China to find its origin in bats. Like many, she won’t escape the pandemic fully unscathed.

Mosquitoes bring “Dengue” from Puerto Rico to New York City, then New Mexico and Hawai‘i. This novel expands the MayaVerse by alternating point-of-view chapters between Maya and her public health veterinarian mentor, Faye Simpson. Faye’s a kick-ass character in her late sixties, transplanted from a childhood on a Colorado ranch to a career with the New York City health department.

“Ebola,” available this summer, broadens even more with the perspectives of multiple male characters confronting the virus in West Africa, New York City, and New Mexico. Maya’s finishing a final training year with the CDC and Faye is retired from fulltime public health work but still enmeshed in Ebola crises.

These brief summaries only touch on the lively characters in the stories. Fred Grinwold and Nancy Bingham are Maya’s physician supervisors in New Mexico and Arizona. Their early romance and outbreak puzzles are available along with other Faye Simpson stories in “Microbial Mysteries,” my short story collection.

Sci fi thrillers are entertaining but sometimes based on pure imagination. For a peek into the exciting real world of zoonotic disease control through the perspective of colorful and compelling characters, join me in the MayaVerse!

Dengue: A Microbial Mystery

Is dengue the next pandemic? Two veterinary medical detectives, decades apart in age and experience, battle the tropical disease on the mainland, then in Hawai‘i. Even in paradise, people can’t escape blood-thirsty mosquitoes spurred on by a warming climate. Join these resilient women as they push through personal challenges to discover the scientific truth and stop the relentless death toll.

From reviews:

Maya Maguire is a deeply complex character, with a backstory that contains both heartache and joy. I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know her … As for the medical terminology in the book … You’re in capable hands. Dr. Eidson uses real-life medical words and situations in the book, but they’re always put into a context that allows the reader to understand exactly what’s going on. (As an aside, the research that must have gone into this book is mind-blowing.)

Buy Links: https://books2read.com/millicenteidson/ or Dengue: A Microbial Mystery (MayaVerse): Eidson, Millicent: 9781955481168: Amazon.com: Books

Millicent Eidson, a master of intrigue and suspense, weaves her literary magic through the pages of the Maya Maguire microbial mystery series. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for scientific puzzles, she invites readers into a world where microbes hold secrets more treacherous than any criminal. Millicent’s career as a public health veterinarian and epidemiologist began at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After days filled with pathogens and outbreaks, the nights belonged to whispered tales of microbes dancing in her imagination. Upon retirement, her passion for storytelling blossomed into the MayaVerse, https://drmayamaguire.com/.

She can be found at Facebook, Millicent Eidson, | LinkedIn, Millicent Eidson (@EidsonMillicent) / Twitter, and Millie Eidson (@drmayamaguire) • Instagram photos and videos

Microscopic microbes that kill—those have been my life’s blood for forty years as a veterinary epidemiologist with state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now focused on communicating public health through creative writing, I’ve published ten shorter works and the first novel of my alphabetical series, “Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery.”

Epidemiologists used to joke that everyone thought we were skin doctors. Now in the age of COVID, much of the public is sick to death of public health pronouncements. But there are enough people who are fascinated by the science and inside story of how diseases are routed out and conquered. The West Wing immersed us in the personal and professional challenges for public servants in the White House. The MayaVerse provides a backstage pass to veterinarians in public rather than private practice.

Medical thrillers usually have physician pathologists as the heroes, but medical detectives can include veterinarians specializing in zoonoses, diseases transmitted from animals. “One Health” is the concept that humans, other species, and the environment are intricately intertwined. Ignoring one part places the others at peril.

The MayaVerse is the world of Dr. Maya Maguire, a young veterinary epidemiologist starting her first assignment as part of the CDC shock troops called Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers. I had the honor of beginning my own public health career as an EIS Officer, and my creative writing is inspired by my mentors, peers, and successors. Maya is partially modeled on my daughter, adopted as an infant from China. She’s been a close collaborator at creating the story of a ‘fish out of water’ growing up Asian in the American Southwest.

The author Edward Abbey said that our definition of beauty is formed by the land imprinting our brains during childhood. I bless my good fortune for growing up in Arizona. No place on earth is more spectacular to me than the Sonoran desert.

With climate change scorching the earth and increasing asthma-inducing wildfires, my retirement home is along the gorgeous shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. However, the Southwest still has my soul and is the initial setting for the MayaVerse. In the second novel “Borrelia” to be published June, 2022, Maya’s investigations into this squiggly spirochete will take her to Europe, and the fifteen years of her life until “Zika” will take us all on a worldwide adventure.

Shorter works, many available for free at HOME (drmayamaguire.com), provide some prequels and side stories for lively secondary characters. Those who sign up for my Reader list will be emailed the e-book and pdf versions of my award-winning short play “Monuments,” which dramatizes a fictional encounter in Santa Fe’s Plaza inspired by real-life controversy over its phallic monument.

“Anthracis” is published wide so available through bookstores, libraries, and multiple online sources including Amazon. Links for the e-book, paperback, hardcover, and large print versions are available at ANTHRACIS (drmayamaguire.com). Please join me on this grand adventure through the microbial world!

Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery

In the hottest summer on record, the spectacular southwestern desert is alive with Bacillus anthracis spores. Maya Maguire, new veterinarian with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, battles the largest anthrax outbreak in U.S. history.

Despite lingering trauma from a childhood accident, Maya’s confidence builds with a supportive team of passionate physician Manolo Miranda and enigmatic veterinarian Dave Schwartz.

But Homeland Security and the FBI are suspicious when spores match Dave’s home Texas Triangle of Death. If Maya can’t find the source, thousands may perish. Anthracis takes us to the front lines with scientists betting their lives on the investigation outcome.

Buy Links: https://drmayamaguire.com/anthracis

MILLICENT EIDSON is the author of the alphabetical Maya Maguire microbial mystery series. The MayaVerse at https://drmayamaguire.com includes prequels, “El Chinche” in Danse Macabre and “What’s Within” in Fiction on the Web, and a side story, “Pérdida” in El Portal Literary Journal. Author awards include Best Play in Synkroniciti and Honorable Mention from the Arizona Mystery Writers.

Dr. Eidson’s work as a public health veterinarian and epidemiologist began with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and continued at the New Mexico and New York state health departments. She is a public health faculty member at the University at Albany and the University of Vermont.

Millicent discusses her first novel “Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery” at Microbial Mystery Author Dr Millicent Eidson on Big Blend Radio – YouTube.

She can be found on Twitter, @EidsonMillicent, and Instagram, @drmayamaguire.