Synopsis: Book Four in the JP Kornig Series
A new kind of burn is reshaping modern warfare-and medicine is losing.
When classified Pentagon data reveals that missile and drone burns are sidelining soldiers and civilians for months-or forever-JP Kornig and his wife, Mandi, find themselves-and their company, NinthWave Biobotanica-drawn into a new arena of ethnopharmacology and quiet espionage. From a high-altitude research lab in Mammoth Lakes, California, to NinthWave's headquarters on the cold waters of Anacortes, Washington, the mandate from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs is stark: find a way to heal what fire has erased.
The search for a deep-burn therapy begins inside secure conference rooms at the Pentagon-but it does not stay there.
As NinthWave's work accelerates, it pulls Kornig into cartel violence in Mexico, discreet negotiations that echo through the halls of the Kremlin, and back-channel pharmaceutical dealings routed through Vienna, Austria, where science, commerce, and geopolitics quietly intersect. Whoever controls the next breakthrough in burn medicine will control far more than a cure.
The trail leads not forward-but backward.
Hidden yew groves in the Pacific Northwest. Fragments of ancestral knowledge. A lineage that carried a dangerous understanding from Siberia, across ice and oceans, thousands of years ago. A tree once stripped nearly to extinction. A medicine born of restraint. A warning humanity has ignored before.
Through advanced quantum reconstruction, ethnopharmacology, and hard-won trust, the past begins to speak-of seeds planted in silence, of survival measured not by what is taken, but by what is protected.
Burning Whispers is a novel of pharmaceutical science and secrecy, of love tested under pressure, and of the thin line between discovery and destruction.
In a world hungry for miracles, it asks a dangerous question:
Can humanity learn to heal-without burning the future to do it?
Autobiography: John F. Derr, RPh, FASCP, FHIMSS, is a Distinguished Alumnus of Purdue University's School of Pharmacy and holds an Executive Certificate from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. A retired U.S. Navy Captain and recipient of the Meritorious Service Medal, he served over 30 years on active duty and in the Naval Reserve, including command of two WWII destroyers. Derr's 60-year career as a healthcare executive includes leadership roles at E.R. Squibb & Sons, Searle, Siemens Medical Systems, and the American Health Care Association. He is a nationally recognized expert in health information technology and a founder of the LTPAC Health IT Collaborative.
