We All Fall Down

Praise for Daniel Kalla

OF FLESH AND BLOOD

“[Kalla] plunges us straight into the frenzied pace of the OR and [into] a medical drama that spans a hundred years. He’s a strong storyteller who keeps his characters moving and struggling, and we’re right there, struggling with them, rooting for them.”

Vancouver Sun

“A rich medical narrative that combines the past with the present and throws into the mix visionary doctors, supportive nurses, hospital politics, children with cancer, celebrity patients, a lethal infection, adultery, and unrequited love.”

Library Journal

COLD PLAGUE

“Similar in many ways to Michael Crichton and even Dan Brown’s bestsellers, Cold Plague is testament to just how good commercial fiction can be: entertaining, informative, and downright fun.”

Winnipeg Free Press

“Plenty of suspense and layering on the kind of scientific detail that fans of medical thrillers crave. Recommend this one to fans of Robin Cook and other such A-listers.”

Booklist

BLOOD LIES

“Kalla strikes again with another perfect page-turner.”

LEE CHILD, New York Times bestselling author

“Fast-paced and smartly written. . . . Kalla has quickly matured into a force to be reckoned with.”

Booklist

“Fans of Presumed Innocent will find welcome echoes of that modern classic in Blood Lies.”

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Kalla’s well-paced medical thriller has twists that surprise us, but always make sense.”

Entertainment Weekly

RAGE THERAPY

“[Kalla’s] first novel, Pandemic, was as fine a medical thriller as I’ve ever read; his newest, Rage Therapy, is a taut psychological thriller that will pull you into a world of sexual deviancy, murder, and mind games. A very good read.”

NELSON DEMILLE, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Kalla navigates the emerging fields of impulse and rage control therapy, and the issue of doctor-patient abuse, turning it all into an ingenious thriller.”

Ottawa Citizen

RESISTANCE

“Daniel Kalla’s prescription for a perfect thriller includes snappy characters, a pace that sweeps up a reader, and not too much technical jargon. . . . The kind of magnetic story you can’t put down.”

Vancouver Province

“[Kalla] continues his remarkable side career as the author of knowledgeable, but very scary medical thrillers.”

Seattle Post Intelligencer

PANDEMIC

“Michael Crichton ought to be looking over his shoulder. He has some serious competition in Kalla.”

The Chronicle Herald

“Kalla expertly weaves real science and medicine into a fast-paced, nightmarish thriller—a thriller all the more frightening because it could really happen.”

TESS GERRITSEN, internationally bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles books

“Very much in the Michael Crichton school of cutting-edge scientifically rooted thrillers. Pandemic is an absorbing, compulsive thriller, the sort of book you could stay up too late reading.”

Vancouver Sun

For my daughters,

Chelsea and Ashley

Chapter

One

There he is again. Watching, always watching. Doesn’t the old bastard have anything better to do? Vittoria Fornero wonders as she rolls up the blueprint and tucks it under her arm.

The little monk has shown up at the site every day since the first crew arrived to tear down the old monastery. As always, he’s wearing a traditional black Benedictine habit with the hood down, exposing a wispy ring of white hair around his otherwise bald scalp. Every morning at about nine o’clock or so, he appears with a rusty fold-up chair held under one arm and a black satchel worn over the other. Sometimes he sips from a thermos or reads from a well-thumbed leather prayer book. But usually, like now, he just sits near the edge of the excavation pit and watches like a pigeon perched on a building’s eave.