SALT LAKE CITY UT June 1, 2015
Dr. Jen Delozier first discovered WiDo Publishing™ by doing research on QueryTracker.net. After checking out WiDo’s website and published books, she decided to submit her debut medical thriller.
Titled “Type and Cross,” the novel is about a nightmare-plagued, tequila-swilling psychologist-for-hire, Dr. Persephone Smith, who takes on a madman physician and creator of a virus that kills people with type O blood.
WiDo submissions editor Allie Maldonado says this about Delozier’s book: “It’s an intense, fast-paced read. I like how Jen takes us into the minds of both the killer and the profiler. I couldn’t put it down and stayed up half the night finishing it.”
J. L. Delozier grew up poor in a small town in Pennsylvania, in a home with little money but plenty of books. She recalls, “I spent most of my time reading the classics. Even then, I loved to write poems and short stories, going so far as to submit my first story-handwritten in pencil on lined school paper-to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine at age 11. Not surprisingly, it was (kindly) rejected! Classic science fiction-think Asimov and Clark-became my favorite, and my love of science lead me to pursue a career in medicine, a goal that seemed nearly unattainable given my circumstances.”
Through scholarships and sheer will, Delozier worked her way through Penn State University and Thomas Jefferson Medical College (now renamed the Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in 6 years instead of the usual 8, graduating with honors. With the intensity of medical school, subsequent residency and the early part of her career as a rural family doctor, “writing became an afterthought,” says Delozier. “Later, as a government physician caring for America’s veterans and deploying to disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav, I could no longer ignore the fact that these dramatic and often heartbreaking experiences would make a hell of a good book.”
“Type and Cross” is Delozier’s first attempt at merging medical science, some real and some imagined, into a fictional thrill ride. Her second novel tells the dramatic backstory of how Dr. Persephone Smith morphed from a pious, empathetic VA psychologist into a hardened atheist and criminal profiler, all during the course of one horrific stay in a San Antonio hurricane shelter, where an insane, murderous entity becomes more dangerous than the surrounding storm.
“Jen’s second novel sounds as thrilling as the first,” says Maldonado, “and I can’t wait to read it!”
J. L. Delozier spent the early part of her career as a rural family doctor and then later as a government physician, caring for America’s veterans and deploying to disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav. Throughout it all, she quietly absorbed the sometimes fascinating, often heartbreaking and always dramatic life stories of her patients. She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and four rescue cats.