The Dean Comes Clean
A comedy thriller
Who said it was safe at the top of the ivory tower?
A comedy thriller set at an elite Southern university. A conflict-averse dean, a comatose basketball star, and a cover-up that reaches all the way to the top. Sharp, funny, and impossible to put down.
The story
Dr. George Pflug is a conflict-averse divorced epidemiologist with an enlarged prostate and a bleeding heart. In over his head as the new dean of public health at Dupont University — the self-styled "Harvard of the South" — Pflug's chief ambition is to avoid drama.
He is not going to get what he wants.
For a man who just wanted to stay out of trouble, Pflug turns out to be surprisingly hard to stop.
When a once-in-a-generation NBA prospect turns up comatose in a mountain hospital, Pflug's better judgment loses out to his conscience. Before long he is snooping in medical records he has no business accessing and uncovering a cover-up that reaches all the way to a mega-donor with dark proclivities and bottomless resources.
The author
Chris Plowe has published op-eds in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major outlets, as well as hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He holds degrees in philosophy and medicine from Cornell and a master's in public health from Columbia. He spent decades as a world-renowned malaria researcher and professor, conducting fieldwork across Africa and Southeast Asia, before serving as a senior leader in global health at Duke University. He brings a view from the top of the ivory tower rarely seen in campus fiction. A past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, he has 20,000+ contacts in academia and global health. He grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and now lives in Woodstock, New York, where he enjoys tooling around the Catskills on his vintage Harley-Davidson.
The Dean Comes Clean is his first novel.
For literary agents
The Dean Comes Clean is a comedy thriller. Agents are invited to reach out to request the pitch, synopsis, and sample chapters.