Book 1 of The Wormwood Duology
An elderly man is carried into the emergency department of the Health Sciences Centre in St. John’s, setting off a chain of events that leaves doctors mystified. He is the first of many victims suffering from severe nosebleeds and excruciating pain. Dr. Luke Gillespie and Nurse Agatha Catania investigate their symptoms but are unable to diagnose them. The only thing they have in common is Sgt. Nicholas Myra, an investigator with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.
Dr. Gillespie and Sgt. Myra join forces to solve this twisted mystery. But the story takes a critical turn when Sister Pius, a nun from Mercy Convent, informs them about Wormwood: a disease she believes is created by God to kill perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. Wormwood becomes an international media storm when parish priest Father Peter Cooke holds a news conference on the steps of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist and announces that God has unleashed a plague upon the earth.
Is God truly punishing these criminals, or is a serial killer targeting them? Dr. Gillespie and Sgt. Myra race to find answers, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy starts bringing people back to the Church in droves . . . by cashing in on what it claims to be a miracle.

Helen C. Escott is the author of the widely read blog-turned-book I Am Funny Like That, which has over 222,000 readers, and two bestselling crime thrillers: Operation Wormwood, which was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel in 2019; and Operation Vanished, which was the Silver Medal Winner for Best Regional Fiction, awarded by the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Both Operation Vanished and Operation Wormwood have appeared in the Atlantic Books Today top 5 bestsellers lists. Her fourth book is, In Search of Adventure: 70 Years of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Newfoundland and Labrador, which profiles retired RCMP members and commemorates their service. And her fifth book, Operation Wormwood: The Reckoning, is the exciting conclusion to the crime novel Operation Wormwood.Helen is used to blazing trails. She is a retired civilian member of the world-renowned Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). In 1998, she created the RCMP’s Media Relations/ Communications Unit in Newfoundland and Labrador, and she became the first female senior communications strategist and media relations spokesperson for the RCMP in that province.Escott was the communications lead on high-profile events, including the RCMP’s Newfoundland and Labrador response on September 11 after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City. During her service, she wrote and implemented the Atlantic Region Communication Strategies to combat organized crime and outlaw biker gangs, created the Media Relations course and guidebook used by the RCMP, and was invited to teach the Media Relations course for senior management and RCMP members at the Canadian Police College, Ottawa. Helen is regularly asked to teach this course to other uniformed services. She also served as a communications strategist at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.Before joining the RCMP, Helen C. Escott worked in the media for 13 years in various positions, including reporter, on-air personality, marketing, and promotions.In 2017, she was presented with the CLB Governor and Commandant’s Medallion in recognition of her achievements of excellence in volunteering and fundraising work, including creating the idea and concept for the Spirit of Newfoundland dinner theatre show Where Once They Stood, a tribute to the Church Lads’ Brigade members who served at Beaumont Hamel.Helen also volunteers with St. Mark’s Anglican Church and created a successful communication strategy to bring people, especially families and members of the LGBTQ community, back to the church.In 2019, she was presented with the Governor General’s Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers.

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Donna Morrissey was born in The Beaches, a small village on the northwest coast of Newfoundland that had neither roads nor electricity until the 1960s a place not unlike Haire’s Hollow, which she depicts in Kit’s Law. When she was sixteen, Morrissey left The Beaches and struck out across Canada, working odd jobs from bartending to cooking in oil rig camps to processing fish in fish plants. She went on to earn a degree in social work at Memorial University in St. Johns. It was not until she was in her late thirties that Morrissey began writing short stories, at the urging of a friend, a Jungian analyst, who insisted she was a writer. Eventually she adapted her first two stories into screenplays, which both went on to win the Atlantic Film Festival Award; one aired recently on CBC. Kit’s Law is Morrissey’s first novel, the winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association First-Time Author of the Year Award and shortlisted for many prizes, including the Atlantic Fiction Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Morrissey lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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