After a decades-long career as a physician, Mary Rae ’75 is thrilling readers with her series of medical whodunits.
What are the elements of a compelling mystery novel? Start with interesting characters. Sprinkle subtle clues that take on greater significance later. And always have a surprise twist.
Mary Rae ’75 certainly didn’t see her surprise career twist coming. Sure, she’d pivoted a few times within her rewarding medical career in Texas. She served for 20 years as an emergency room physician, worked as a primary care doctor at Texas Christian University’s student health center, then spent several years in community health before retiring from the field in 2020 and moving to Oakland, Calif.
But on a 2018 trip to Galveston, Texas, with her longtime physician friend Wanda Venters, Rae offhandedly mentioned that the historic coastal city would make a great setting for a mystery novel. Venters replied, “Well, why don’t we write one?”
The pair has since written not one but three medical mysteries featuring their physician protagonists, Louise Finnerty, MD, and Marnie Liccione, MD. Their characters have taken on challenges ranging from dengue fever to PTSD and opiate use to a cold murder case with suspected mob ties. “The writing is so much fun,” Rae says. “We’re not looking to win the Booker Prize. These are page-turners for when you’re looking for a good airplane read.”
Rae’s medical career was a surprise twist in itself compared to her career aspirations while at Colgate, where she majored in geology. But after moving with her soon-to-be husband, Cody Arnold ’75, back to his native Oklahoma so he could attend medical school, she realized, “I was better suited to a career involving people.”
Her geology degree provided an unexpectedly perfect preparation for medical school. “Our geology studies were so eclectic, drawing on physics, chemistry, and biology,” she says. “You used your head; it was diagnostic.”
Throughout her medical career, Rae served as a subject matter expert for her mother, Catherine Rae, who wrote eight mysteries after the age of 65. “She’d call and say, ‘Oh, darling, I need to know how I can kill somebody with arsenic,’” Rae says. “I would never have thought about writing a murder mystery if it hadn’t been for her.”
For each book, Rae and Venters work out a broad plot outline and then break up the writing by character. Rae writes Louise Finnerty, who, like Rae, is an even-tempered emergency room physician, is married with two children, and has a dog named Chico. “Our family members and pets have shown up quite a bit in our books,” she says.
The first Finnerty and Liccione mystery, Break Bone Fever, was published in 2021, when Rae was 65. It revolves around the death of a physician who’d been researching dengue fever at a high-security infectious disease laboratory modeled after the Galveston National Laboratory, which the authors toured for research. The book was a finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Awards.
Their second book, Breaking Apart, set at a Colorado veterans administration hospital, won the Silver Falchion Award for best thriller at the 2024 Killer Nashville competition. “That was great validation, to win a national award,” Rae says.
Their third book, Breaking News (December 2024), returns to Galveston and explores the city’s history of organized crime.
“I think our training gives us an edge within the medical mystery genre,” Rae says. She recently presented a talk on how to write medical scenes to the Northern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America.
The authors are currently working on their fourth mystery, which will be set on a fictional college campus in Colorado, where Venters lives.
Rae is always on the lookout for details to include in her writing. “I might see something at the supermarket or on a walk and think, ‘That just might work in the story,’” she says. “I’ve run into people who’ve ended up in my books in both good ways and bad. But hopefully the villains don’t recognize themselves.”