"Death in a White Coat" is a medical mystery, the first novel by Larry Kirshbaum, a 55-year veteran of the publishing industry. Set within the walls of a prestigious fictional Manhattan hospital, the novel revolves around the mysterious death of a talented and wealthy young medical student who seems to have a brilliant life and career ahead of him.

Drawing on his background of working with some of the great thriller and mystery writers over his long career, Kirshbaum explores what happens when a cocky and lustful male student in his first clinical year manages to alienate some of his intimate female admirers in the hospital world. Their quest for revenge becomes the job of a senior NYPD detective to sort out whether the student's death was a murder or suicide or perhaps a combination of his bad timing and restless ego that coincided with his female associates (and a male or two) looking for love in all the wrong places.

The major characters in the book include the cocky student Sherman "Sandy" Wainwright, his initial instructor, the Resident Doctor Ashley Dillon, who tends to attract unavailable men, and Barney Kazinski, the police veteran who finds himself caught in a mid-life search for his true comfort zone in law enforcement. From his earliest journalistic experiences as an editor of his high school and college newspapers, the author Larry Kirshbaum has always been fascinated with the written word in print or digital formats.

After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1966 he worked as a journalist for Newsweek Magazine and co-authored a non-fiction study of student protest with a Michigan Daily classmate Roger Rapoport entitled "Is the Library Burning?" It was published by Random House in 1970. Most of Kirshbaum's publishing career was spent at the Warner Book Group where he became publisher in 1985 and CEO for ten years starting in 1997.

He also worked as a literary agent with the Scott Waxman Agency and spent three years from 2011-14 managing the New York City office of Amazon Book Publishing. He now lives in Manhattan with his wife of 57 years, Barbara, whom he met in his freshman year at Michigan.

Their children and grandchildren live close by with a dog and a cat in their respective families. “Larry Kirshbaum is a legend – with the best instincts of anyone I’ve ever met in publishing, and I’ve met just about everybody.

Now Kirshbaum has written a smart, tightly plotted, witty and funny medical mystery that’s absolutely going to be a bestseller. Imagine this: Your favorite character in Grey’s Anatomy is murdered in the first minute of an episode.

That’s what it’s like to read Death in a White Coat. This one gets five stars from me.

” - James Patterson. .