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An Ellipse of Skin
Paperback
Publisher: Paul Boor
Published: May 1 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It's the winter of 1969-70, the nation is bitterly divided over the war raging in Vietnam, and Dr. Joe Cansoni, a bright young pathologist-in-training at Boston's premier Harvard teaching hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), is examining a routine skin biopsy under his microscope. Joe learns that this patient, a renowned anti-war activist, has died suddenly and unexpectedly-autopsy reveals a brain turned to mush! Looking again at that seemingly harmless skin biopsy, Joe is stunned to see tiny worms burrowing deep into blood vessels . . . he seeks out his old high school crush, Boston Globe reporter Kate McCannon, for help. Joe and Kate uncover a nationwide plot to assassinate anti-war protestors, then find themselves as targets. Is our own government behind it? Evading all peril, they must find a solution, and through their hunt for the killers, Joe wins Kate's heart and comes-of-age as a scientist.
AN ELLIPSE OF SKIN is a real-science thriller, an American Science Thriller of the Vietnam era, written by a scientist. The author, Paul Boor, M.D., is a pathologist, scientist, and professor at the oldest medical school west of the Mississippi, in Galveston, Texas. AN ELLIPSE OF SKIN explores how one must overcome the destructive influences of war, and one's own human frailties, to become a scientist.
There is an international component of AN ELLIPSE OF SKIN; the novel is set in the years of the Vietnam War, when antiwar activity rattled the United States and the world with massive and violent antiwar demonstrations, the Invasion of Cambodia in 1970 by the U.S. military, and the Kent State Shootings. The Cambodian genocide of 1978 is a key plot element of the novel. That horrific genocide claimed over 1.5 million victims, under the cruel rule of madman Pol Pot. Today, skeletal remains buried in 23,745 documented mass graves in Southeast Asia bear witness to what is known as The Killing Fields.
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