MALCHARIST
The debut novel from journalist and writer Paul John Scott
“Screamed with laughter the first half, now just screaming.”
- Harriet V, reader, East Sussex, U.K.
“If it weren’t a cliché, I’d say Malcharist is impossible to put down. The prose is razor-sharp, and it has the narrative drive of a crime thriller. It is also extremely funny. If John Le Carré had the dark, lacerating wit of Hunter S. Thompson, he might have written a book like this.”
- Carl Elliott, author, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine
ABOUT THE BOOK
It’s Manhattan in the winter of 2010, and Shivani Patel is carrying the secrets of a trade that no one understands: medical ghostwriting. A Cambridge-trained scientist and wordsmith for the world’s largest drugmaker, she makes her soaring pay by delivering the sleight-of-hand needed to move new drugs into medical journals and onto market. Then she watches as a parade of aging males take credit for her work.
Halfway across the country, Griffin Wagner is slumming it in Minneapolis as a freelance reporter for In the Zone, a downmarket men’s magazine and his lifeline in the collapse of print. When fate leads both Shivani and Griffin to a problem with the world’s favorite pill and the celebrity psychiatrist who promoted it, Shivani’s powerful employers go to war with the three of them.
A literary thriller at the intersection of science, belief and mass media, Malcharist is a globe-traveling debut about lonely jobs, the seduction of brain chemistry narratives in an age of industrial polypharmacy, and the troubling rise of indiscriminate violence in our time.
As of October 2021, MALCHARIST is without a publisher at this time. Some copies may still be available through Amazon. We hope to find a new publisher soon.
PRAISE FOR MALCHARIST
“‘Malcharist,’ while imminently entertaining, is also thought-provoking and deeply disturbing. It invites the reader to consider the perils created when science succumbs to marketing…[this] debut novel exhibits a knack for both clever dialogue and making dense ideas enjoyable.”
- John Sievers, Rochester Post-Bulletin
“The acts of villainy aren't what are unsettling about this novel. It's that so much of the story lies hidden in plain sight…it's going to be hard to think about the global pharmaceutical industry in the same way again.”
- Lee Schafer, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Drug Companies are only marginally less ruthless than drug cartels. If you loved ‘El Chapo’ & ‘Narcos’, you’ll also love ‘Malcharist’. This fast paced novel captures all the slimy ways Pharma pushes product, hooks us on often ineffective [or] unsafe pills. Good read on evil industry.”
- Allen Frances, MD, author, Twilight of American Sanity, Saving Normal; DSM-IV Task Force, Chair; Duke Department of Psychiatry, Former Chair
“I don’t often read novels, but if this is Paul John Scott’s first, sign me up for more. The best book I’ve read in a long time. Medical ghostwriting, drug suicide side effects, big name Key Opinion Leaders, a struggling journalist. Powerful.”
- Gary Schwitzer, Founder & Publisher, HealthNewsReview.org
“Scott has done his homework in such a way that one of medicine’s darkest secrets is exposed in all of its sordid detail.”
- Leemon McHenry, co-author, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine
“This novel will swallow you whole. Beginning with the first few pages, a feeling of dread begins to take hold, a sensation that only intensifies as the author takes us through one plot twist after another until the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys becomes hopelessly blurred...”
- Patrick D. Hahn, author, Madness and Genetic Determinism
“An engaging, fast-moving read that has the corruption in the clinical trials business down cold. It takes real talent to turn this subject into a page-turner, and that is what Paul John Scott has accomplished with Malcharist.”
- Robert Whitaker, author, Anatomy of an Epidemic and Mad in America
“Paul John Scott is a fabulous writer. This novel hits you so hard that it should come with a warning label.”
- Victor Montori, MD, author, Why We Revolt
“If you’re like me, you won’t be able to put down this taut, racy thriller about the pharmaceutical industry. If, at the end, you breathe a sigh of relief – it is fiction after all - what you really need to know, the scariest thing of all, is that it’s all too true. All too accurate. And it almost certainly applies to whatever drug you happen to be taking now.”
- David Healy, author, Pharmageddon, Let Them Eat Prozac, The Antidepressant Era
"Completely engrossing, dramatic, powerful and ACCURATE."
- Kevin P. Miller, documentary filmmaker, Generation Rx
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul John Scott is a reporter and writer who lives in Minnesota. His work has been published in the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Outside, Details, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Ski, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Star Tribune, and The Fargo Forum. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for writing that appeared in Outside. He lives in Rochester with his wife and two children. Malcharist is his first novel.
CONTACT
CONTACT PAUL JOHN SCOTT