Maya Hope

«Maya Hope» is the first novel in Timothy Browne's Dr. Nicklaus Hart series. Browne is an orthopaedic surgeon who spent years on medical missions in Guatemala, Central America and beyond, and the hospital scenes carry that first-hand weight.

Nicklaus Hart is a gifted trauma surgeon with no particular reason to get up in the morning. What holds him together breaks when his closest friend, a missionary doctor, is found sacrificed at the base of a Maya temple. Hart travels to Guatemala to fill the gap his friend left at the mission hospital — and finds, in the children he treats there, something he had stopped looking for.

He also finds that his friend's death was not random. As Hart pulls at it, the thread leads somewhere he is entirely unequipped to follow: a North Korean bioterror operation, and a virus with a history — the same pathogen, the book proposes, that once emptied the Maya world, now days away from being released on the rest of it.

The novel is openly a work of Christian fiction: Hart's recovery of faith runs alongside the thriller plot rather than behind it, and the two resolve together. Readers who want the medical and geopolitical machinery without the spiritual thread should know that going in; readers who want both will find them evenly weighted.