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.
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.
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.
For a man who just wanted to stay out of trouble, Pflug turns out to be surprisingly hard to stop.
The author
Chris Plowe is a physician and malaria researcher. He trained at Cornell and Columbia, spent decades doing fieldwork in Africa and Southeast Asia, and served as a senior leader in global health at Duke. He is a past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He grew up in 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
Pitch, synopsis, sample chapters, or the full manuscript available on request.