Featured Interview With Sophy Smythe
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Sophy Smythe is the pen name of a Dutch medical doctor, living in Antwerp, Belgium. After thirty years of medical practice, I decided to pursue my long-lived dream: writing fact-based medical thrillers. When I’m not writing, I do yoga, hike or do standing up peddling with my dog Pepper or play golf.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
As long as I can remember I have read books. Science, politics, management, memoirs, thrillers, mysteries, you name it, I possibly read it or heard of it. My parents gave me a subscription of the local library, and it didn’t last a few years or I had read all the books in the children’s department. Still, the nicest gift you can give me is a book.
I was seven, when I wrote my first story in the children’s department of the local newspaper and I kept writing all my life. When I was a doctor I wrote lots of non-fiction articles for medical magazines and public and was co-author for two books about how to age and keep fit and how to avoid burnout for managers. The Medical Code is the first mystery-thriller in the Charlie Martens, MD series.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Actually, I don’t have favourite authors. My favourite books are fact-based adventures, mystery-thrillers and suspense, where you keep asking yourself what is true and what is fiction. Like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or Wilbur Smith’s Courtney series. I, myself get inspired by ugly facts, like the settlement of a pharmaceutical company for hundreds of millions of dollars, because they promoted an antidepressant for children and adolescents. A lot of those treated children committed suicide. And the medicine is still on the market. That story gave birth to The Medical Code.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic in Antwerp, Belgium, Doctor Charlotte Martens receives an urgent late-night call from her friend who is a member of the European Medicines Agency. The next day Charlotte learns that her friend was violently murdered and that she herself is now the prime suspect. Because the police find a baffling code beside the murder victim, Charlotte enlists the help of an investigative journalist. She and the journalist discover that her murdered friend was about to expose a conspiracy of fraud and corruption within the pharma industry involving the government, certain reputable doctors and even the European Medicines Agency.
With both the police and the murderer closing in on them, Charlotte and the journalist must stay alive long to find the hard evidence necessary to bring down a faceless pharma company that will clearly stop at nothing to protect their secret network.
In an exhilarating blend of adventure, cutting wit and actual facts, doctor Charlotte Martens is a controversial figure to appear in the first book of intriguing fact-thrillers, where facts and fiction blur.
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