Summary of Previous Luncheon Meeting 

The Luncheon Meeting took place on: February 7, 2026

• Topic: “The Physician-Author and the Call of Mystery Writing ”

• Presenter: Kate Scannell and Mary Rae

Summary:

Kate Scannell

Medical practice and the craft of mystery writing share amazing kinship. Both require careful observation, systematic thinking, openness to the unexpected, curiosity about human behavior, and the capacity to construct narratives from pieces of a puzzle. The RPA Winter Luncheon  presentation by two physician mystery writers—Kate Scannell and Mary Rae--explores why physicians are uniquely positioned to succeed at writing mysteries, and why the genre offers creative fulfillment.

Kate Scannell lives, writes, and gardens in the East Bay. She has published extensively in professional and lay media, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine. Between 2000 and 2014, she wrote a medical opinion column for several Bay Area newspapers and their digital outlets, including The Oakland Tribune, The Mercury News, and The East Bay Times. Her columns explored the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of American health care and medical practice.

Informed by her experiences as the medical director for one of the country's first hospital AIDS wards, she wrote Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic (Cleis Press, 1999). This memoir recounts her coming-of-age as a female physician while caring for people with AIDS, most of whom would die, during the early epidemic years (1985-1990).

In September 2018, she published Immortal Wounds: A Doctor Nora Kelly Mystery. This first-in-series mystery follows a doctor who is struggling to recover from a devastating family trauma. She is drawn back into her life and work during a perilous quest to solve the mystery of multiple deaths occurring among the staff at Oakland City Hospital. Two in-series books followed: Lethal Control and Double Fault—dealing, respectively, with themes of environmental justice and rogue stem cell treatments.

Kate is a retired TPMG internist and rheumatologist. She also served as the Director of Medical Ethics for Northern California KP and edited Ethics Rounds. She loved medicine and ethical conundrums, and she intends to stay close to both in her future writing.

Mary Rae

Mary Rae grew up in the New York city suburbs. She graduated from Colgate University before attending the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. After her residency in Emergency Medicine, she moved to Texas where she practiced Emergency Medicine for twenty years. She then changed course to practice Primary Care until her retirement in 2020. Soon after her retirement from medicine, she and her husband moved to Oakland, California.

During her time in Texas, she and her husband raised two children. While living in Houston, she enjoyed exploring the Gulf Coast. Her fascination with the area led to the idea of writing a murder mystery set in Galveston in collaboration with her friend, Wanda Venters. Break Bone Fever, published in 2021, was the result. She was pleased that their first effort was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2022. Two more books in the series followed. Breaking Apart was set in her co-author’s hometown of Aurora, Colorado. The setting was the VA Hospital where a young veteran’s apparent suicide sets off an investigation. It was the winner in the thriller category at the Killer Nashville National Mystery Writers competition. Their third book, Breaking News, brings the main characters back to Galveston, investigating a cold case that delves into the colorful but dark history of the island.

Retirement has allowed Mary to spend time with her two grandchildren, hike all over the Bay Area, continue her lifelong quest for proficiency in Spanish and French, and, of course, to write.