Medical Thrillers Inspired by Real Life

  Hi, I'm Renda Knapp. I'm an OB/GYN practicing in Homer, Alaska. I've spent nearly thirty years delivering babies, navigating rural medicine, and sitting across from women in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. I'm also a wife, a mother of seven adult children, and a debut novelist.

With my first novel, the theme I set out to explore is who we believe, and more importantly, who we don't. Why a pregnant teenager's word carries less weight than a man in a white coat. Why women inside institutions learn to make themselves smaller and quieter so they won't be seen as difficult. And what it costs all of us when we let that keep happening.

This matters to me because I've spent thirty years on both sides of it. I've been the woman who wasn't believed. And I've been the physician who almost didn't believe a patient because her story was inconvenient and messy and didn't fit neatly into a chart. That last one is harder to admit. But it's the more important one.

In the end, Complicit is a thriller about a doctor and a pregnant teenager whose survival depends entirely on whether the doctor will finally listen to the girl everyone else has written off. It's fast, it's dark, there's a body count — but the engine driving it all is that question we keep failing to answer.  Whose voice matters?

                The killer who murdered her husband and drove her sister into hiding isn’t a stranger—he’s at her dinner table, and Dr. Randi Jewell is about to discover just how close she’s kept her enemies.