Daniel DJ Palmer (Michael Palmer) Books in Order

This series highlights the work Michael Palmer created with his son, suspense novelist Daniel Palmer. The stories keep the medical focus that made Michael famous, but add Daniel’s interest in psychology, veterans’ struggles, and the darker side of family life.

Father and son first tried writing together on the short stories Disfigured and The Dead Club. One is a kidnap thriller built around a plastic-surgery nightmare; the other follows a greedy doctor drawn into a betting circle that gambles on when unidentified patients will die. Both pieces show their taste for tight setups, sharp moral corners, and endings that sting.

The collaborations grew into full-length novels after Michael’s death, when Daniel stepped in to finish ideas his father had been developing. Trauma follows Carrie Bryant, a gifted neurosurgical resident whose career implodes after a tragic error in the operating room. Back home, she tries to help her brother, a veteran with severe PTSD, by joining an experimental brain-stimulation program at a VA hospital. When patients begin to disappear, Carrie and a local reporter peel back layers of corruption and find that the promise of a miracle cure is hiding something much more predatory.

Mercy tackles the right-to-die debate from a different angle. Julie Devereux has spent years arguing that terminally ill patients deserve control over how they leave the world. Then a motorcycle crash leaves her fiancé a quadriplegic who begs to end his life. Just as he starts to accept a future together, he dies under bizarre circumstances, and Julie uncovers a pattern of patients who seem to have been helped along by someone playing judge and jury.

The First Family returns to the high-pressure world of the White House. President Geoffrey Hilliard’s teenage son, Cam, develops frightening neurological symptoms that look like rebellious behavior to outsiders. Secret Service agent Karen Ray and her ex-husband, physician Lee Blackwood, chase down a medical mystery that links Cam to another endangered teenager and to secrets reaching deep into national security.

Taken together, these books feel like a bridge between two careers. They keep Michael Palmer’s love of hospital detail, ethical knot-tying, and big conspiracies, while Daniel’s voice leans into damaged families, trauma, and the question of how far people will go for the ones they love. If you’re curious about how a second-generation writer carries forward a legacy, this is the place to see it happen on the page.