For David Farris, the life and death drama in his novel Lie Still came from memory. Farris, a 1981 graduate of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, did his internship at a busy county hospital in Phoenix. "It was the most intense experience of my life," he says. After that, he opted for a year of traveling, temporary work, ranging from an ER in the notorious Hill District of Pittsburgh to covering for a family doctor in a prairie town of 900.

After an anesthesiology residency and subspecialty training in pediatric anesthesia at UCLA, Farris began practice at Emanuel Hospital in Portland, OR, the state's busiest children's hospital and largest trauma center. "Emanuel is a special place," he says. "It has an esprit de corps that comes from extraordinary work. We see it all. From gunshot wounds to conjoined twins."

Farris was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at Stanford. He comes from a family of artists. "Mom was a painter and sculptor - she taught me to weld. Dad is a nature photographer. I learned to print in his darkroom when I was an eighth grader. My sister is a quilter and my brother, besides being a great wildlife painter, is a rock star. He was the guitar player in the 80s band Mr. Mister." Farris says his only claim to musical fame is that he played drums the first time his brother ever performed in public. "I had to quit the band, though. It was interfering with my physics homework."

Photography was Farris's first creative love. "I've been doing art photography since high school. I love it, but when you look at the market for it, it makes you realize the importance of a good day job."

When asked if there is a similarity between photography and writing, he says, "There is some. It's in the way you look at all the things around you, trying to see what's connected to what in a way that might be interesting. Trying to see equivalency, metaphor."

The idea of a medical thriller came to him in his anesthesiology residency. "One of my professors said one of the drugs we used every day would make a perfect murder weapon. That got me going. It took a lot of years to reshape it beyond the trite and obvious, but I think it works."