Freida McFadden is the pen name of a practicing American physician who specializes in treating brain injury, and one of the best-selling psychological-thriller authors of her generation. She published under the pseudonym from her 2013 debut onward, keeping her identity hidden so her medical patients wouldn’t connect her to her fiction, and only revealed her real name publicly in April 2026. The name itself is a medical inside joke — “FREIDA” is the acronym for the American Medical Association’s...
Suicide Med
Suicide Med
Synopsis
At a medical school known by a grim nickname — every year, one student there dies — a new class of first-years arrives carrying their own ambitions, secrets, and breaking points. Heather McKinley is among them, navigating brutal coursework, cadaver labs, and the suffocating pressure of a program that seems built to crush its weakest. The story moves through several students in turn, each narrating a stretch of the academic year and exposing the rivalries, affairs, and quiet desperation festering beneath the institution’s prestige. As the months grind on, it becomes clear the school’s deadly reputation is no coincidence, and that one member of this class will not live to see the end of the year. Told in overlapping perspectives that slowly lock together, it builds dread out of academic ambition and the lengths people will go to protect what they have sacrificed everything to earn.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Heather McKinleyProtagonist
A first-year medical student and one of the narrators navigating the school’s brutal pressures.
Rachel BinghamSupporting
Heather’s roommate and a fellow medical student with her own narrated section.
MasonSupporting
A wealthy, charming student weighed down by his surgeon father’s expectations.
SashaSupporting
A brilliant, ambitious student driven to make her family proud.
Subjects
Places
Edition
Suicide MedPaperback, 2014
522 pages
Createspace Independent Publishing PlatformLanguage: EnglishISBN: 9781500420536
