Nurse tells how she uses her medical knowledge to kill off characters — in grisly but accurate ways — in her thriller novels
Alexandrea Weis, who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, with her husband has written 37 books — and she has used her medical training to create perfect fictional murders in many of them. The advanced practitioner nurse, who works as a clinical consultant, has killed off her characters by suffocation in the library, gunshots and poison.
Alexandrea said: “Gunshots are really cool.” And she added: “The different type of wound can completely alter the person’s death and suffering. ”Making her deaths medically correct also makes her books better, she believes.
She said: “I think making thriller books medically accurate makes them scarier. “As a nurse, it’s important to me that my books are factual, otherwise it just becomes a comedy.”
For Alexandrea, her interest in writing was sparked from an early age. She said: “I was always a writer — I started writing ghost stories aged eight and throughout school I was on honours programmes but I pursued nursing because I wanted to be able to support myself with a stable career.
“I got married and worked my way up in the medical world but all the while I was still writing, and it got to the point where I’d written five books from historical fiction to romance. My husband was the one who urged me to get them published.”
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