High Stakes

"I'm not a vampire," insists Jacob Maresbeth, teenage journalist for the school paper. But what is a vampire, really? What happens if you have all the right symptoms, but are a living, breathing sixteen-year-old boy? Diagnosed with a rare disease, Jake can't help but wonder. After eight years in and out of the Newport News hospital, he's had it up to here with doctors, diseases and dishonesty. After all, Jake's father, respected neurologist Franklyn Maresbeth, has been hiding some of his more unusual symptoms for years... particularly that part about drinking blood. In High Stakes, Jake records his summer vacation in the home of his maiden aunt, the bangled and be-spectacled Professor Sylvia. If that isn't bad enough (and it is), Jake and his theatre-loving sister Lizzy must keep the "unofficial" details of Jake's disorder a secret from Aunt Sylvia's seductively beautiful graduate student, Zsofia. Will Jake survive a whole month pretending to be an invalid? Will Zsofia weaken his resol

About the Author

Author, historian, and adventurer at the intersection, Brandy Schillace (PhD) spends her time in the mist-shrouded alleyways between literature and medicine. Taking a cue from Edward Gorey and John Bellairs, she writes Gothic fiction with a medical twist. Her first series, The Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles, will be out spring 2014 with Cooperative Trade. Dr. Schillace is research associate at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History, managing editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, book reviewer for the Huffington Post, and chief editor for the Fiction Reboot and Daily Dose blog. She helps develop medical humanities curriculum for the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College and teaches for Case Western Reserve University's SAGES program. Her non-fiction book, Death's Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying can Tell us about Life and Living, will be released in 2015 with Elliott and Thompson.

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