Certified Dead

Certified Dead is Combination of Thriller and Sitcom. In Lisbon, forensic pathologist Dr Adrian Vale spends his nights explaining how people died. Then one night, a phone rings from inside a body bag. The caller sends Adrian a death certificate for Mara Bell, a woman who is still alive. Cause of death: anaphylaxis. Time of death: midnight. Certified by: Dr Adrian Vale. There is only one problem. Adrian has never seen the report. And he has forty-three minutes to stop it from becoming true. Saving Mara should have ended the mystery. Instead, it exposes something much bigger. Dead bodies carrying the wrong identities. Medical records that have been altered. Causes of death rewritten for money. People officially declared dead while still walking around Lisbon. Behind it all is something known only as The Registry, a hidden system capable of changing what the world believes happened to the dead. But Adrian has another problem. His own name is already inside it. And Mara knows him. Years earlier, Adrian signed the autopsy report of her husband, Daniel Bell, ruling his death an overdose. Mara never believed it. Now the doctor she blames for burying the truth may be the only person capable of uncovering it. Together with sharp-tongued pathology technician Theo, Adrian and Mara begin following a trail of impossible medical contradictions. A man dies from a heart attack that was not a heart attack. A corpse carries the identity of a living person. A patient nearly dies from something as ordinary as diarrhoea. A toxicology report finds nothing — and that is exactly the problem. Every case begins with the body. Every body tells a story. And somebody is rewriting the ending. Certified Dead is a fast-moving medical crime thriller set in Lisbon, combining forensic mystery, survival puzzles, conspiracy, action, dark humour and characters who are always thinking several moves ahead. The medicine is real enough to teach you something. The explanations are simple enough to understand. And sometimes the only sensible response to death is to laugh before it laughs at you. Because in Adrian Vale’s world, a death certificate does not necessarily mean someone is dead. Sometimes it means someone has decided they should be.

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