Kimmery Martin Books in Order

Kimmery Martin grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where books were part of everyday life. She started writing early, winning a first-grade short-story contest that came with a red stuffed elephant and a spot in the school paper.

Medicine took center stage next. Martin completed her medical training at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and worked in emergency medicine, a career that gave her a close view of high-pressure decisions, hospital routines, and the people behind the scrubs.

Her earliest published writing was medical research, not fiction. After a long break from creative work, she returned to storytelling while balancing a demanding medical career and life with three young children. She wrote steadily, revised heavily, and weathered plenty of rejection before finishing the novel that became her debut.

That book, The Queen of Hearts, arrived in 2018. It follows two Charlotte doctors, pediatric cardiologist Zadie Anson and trauma surgeon Emma Colley, whose long friendship is shaken by the return of someone from medical school and the secret he brings with him. Martin mixes hospital pressure with marriage, parenting, old romance, and the strange ways close friends can still keep things from each other.

She followed it with The Antidote for Everything, set in Charleston. The novel centers on urologist Georgia Brown and her best friend Jonah, a fellow physician facing a frightening conflict at their hospital. It keeps the medical setting, but shifts its focus toward institutional pressure, loyalty, love, and the cost of speaking up.

In Doctors and Friends, Martin brings together three physicians who have stayed connected since medical school. When a new virus begins spreading around the world, each woman faces a different kind of crisis, from an overwhelmed emergency department to pregnancy and public-health work. The novel was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, which gives its imagined outbreak an especially uncanny edge.

Her books tend to stay close to women with difficult jobs and full lives. Friendship is usually the real engine of the story, tested by secrets, professional strain, family obligations, grief, and choices that don't have neat answers.

The hospital is never just a backdrop.

Martin lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and three children. Alongside writing, she teaches narrative medicine, speaks at libraries, conferences, medical schools, and bookstores, and serves the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library through its Board of Trustees and children's-library leadership.

She is also a devoted reader and book recommender, and has interviewed other authors and written about books, travel, parenting, humor, and medical misinformation. Her official bio also makes room for one more credential: Boggle champion.