Peter Clement Books in Order

Peter Clement is a Canadian doctor who worked for twenty years in emergency medicine before becoming a medical thriller author. When he began writing, one of the things he wanted to do was put the reader inside an ER doctor’s head during a cardiac-arrest resuscitation. After reading books by Dick Francis, he noticed how completely Francis could put him inside a jockey’s experience during a steeplechase, and liked the idea for his own books.

He did the same in his thrillers. Earl Garnet is a doctor working in a Buffalo hospital, where one of the murder weapons in the series is a cardiac needle that Garnet himself knows how to use. Richard Steele, the protagonist of Clement’s second series, is also an ER doctor.

The Peter Clement books below include both series, his standalone novels and short stories.

A printable book list is available below. You can print it or save it as a PDF.

How Peter Clement’s Medical Work Became Medical Thrillers

Peter Clement worked for about twenty years in emergency medicine, and during those years he gained a lot of medical knowledge and expertise that later went into his books. He wanted readers to get the same kind of vivid picture in their heads that he himself experienced when reading Dick Francis’s books. Francis made him understand and feel how it is to be a jockey during a race, and Clement wanted to do something similar with an ER doctor who is in the middle of an emergency situation like a cardiac-arrest resuscitation.

He also got ideas from things he encountered outside the ER. For example, he created Mutant after attending a United Nations conference about genetically modified food in 1999. He took that idea and put it in his novel. Now GMO foods and altered DNA became part of a much bigger medical threat.

When writing The Woman from the River, he returned to events that took place some four decades earlier, at the beginning of his ER career. A young woman’s naked body had been found floating in the St. Lawrence River, and Peter Clement was the doctor who pronounced her dead. He never learned who she was or what happened to her, and this case stayed with him all that time. In The Woman from the River, he wanted to give that unknown woman a story.

Peter Clement Biography

Peter Clement is the author pen name of the Canadian physician Peter Clement Duffy. He wanted to keep his identity of a thriller writer separate from his work as a doctor, so he chose his middle name when publishing his books.

Peter Duffy earned his medical degree from Queen’s University in 1970 and then trained in family medicine. By 1976, he was working ER shifts at St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal. In fact, when he was still relatively new to the job, he regularly had the Saturday-night shift. He worked for twenty years in emergency medicine and was chief of an emergency department at a Montreal hospital for eight years.

He got the idea to write medical thrillers back in the early 1990s. Initially, he was writing in his free time during evenings, weekends and holidays, and then later he started dividing his week between working as a doctor and writing. Eventually, he took a two-year sabbatical while working on his debut novel, Lethal Practice, which introduced Earl Garnet in 1997.

He continued writing, and eventually his writing took over most of his time. After his third novel, Peter Clement was offered a two-book contract where he would write a book per year. This is when he left his regular medical practice and focused on writing. At some point, he did go back to medicine, diving his time again between being a doctor and being a writer.

That also helps explain why there is such a long gap between some of his books. It took him five years to complete The Darkness Drops, and he said that during this time he wanted to go back to working as a doctor. His later clinical work focused more on mental health, especially around Covid 19. He continued practicing in Ontario until at least the early 2020s, and resigned his membership in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in June 2024.

In 2022, he published The Woman from the River, set in 1975, his first novel since The Darkness Drops in 2010.

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