The current featured contributor to Writers Read: C. Keith Conners, author of five books, including Feeding the Brain: How Foods Affect Children, and 200 scientific articles.One of the several books from his entry:
A Patent Lie by Paul Goldstein. Good legal thrillers are hard to come by. Most of them seem to be concoctions of flimsy court room dramatics and racy love interests gone wrong and that lack the feel of real life. More often than not the good guys and bad guys are so grossly sketched that you can foretell the outcome after page 3. I was therefore quite captured by this interesting first time novel by a patent lawyer, which both taught me something and gave me a true-to-life complex story involving issues that matter.C. Keith Conners studied at the University of Chicago, attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD. in clinical psychology at Harvard University. He has taught at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh, George Washington University, and Duke, and is Professor Emeritus of Medical Psychology at Duke University Medical School."Patent law?" you say. "How can that be interesting?" Having worked with a lot of pharmaceutical companies in my time as part of my own studies of treatment for mental illness, I can assure you that the intensity and drama around the patenting of new drugs is a fruitful area for high crimes and misdemeanors. In this novel a large overseas drug company and a small local company are engaged in a dispute about the patent for a new drug that promises to have a major impact upon the worldwide AIDS epidemic. There is a question of possible murder of one of the developers of the drug, and a suspicion of possible falsification of data in the drug development. The legal issues are complex but clearly depicted by an author who knows his business. I found this a very satisfying and intriguing novel about real-world issues very close to home.[read on]
Writers Read: C. Keith Conners.
--Marshal Zeringue
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