Melissa Yuan-Innes

Did Uncle Leonard attack a young boy?

An escape artist plunges into the icy waters of Montreal’s St. Lawrence River, chained and nailed into a coffin—and never breaks free.
After they dredge him from the waves, Dr. Hope Sze resuscitates him, saving his life. When he regains consciousness, but not his memory of the event, he hires Hope to deduce who sabotaged his act. Even as she probes the case, and the strange world of magic and illusion, she must confront her own fears of death on the palliative care ward—and tackle the two toothsome men who can’t wait for her to choose between them.

A mother who burns for justice. The doctor who can’t say no. And the killer who lies in wait.

"Melissa Yi has truly found her niche with the Hope Sze mystery series. Drawing on her personal experiences in the ER in Canada, Melissa has created medical thrillers that shine with authenticity and are impossible to put down. Code Blues provides the perfect introduction to a world we often experience, but rarely understand."--Kris Nelscott, Edgar and Shamus Award-nominated author

When Oona's husband asks for an open marriage, she kicks him to the curb and makes a list.
A list of the guys not taken. The first guy she really loved. The guy who morphed into Dr. McDreamy. And the smokin' yoga teacher with abs of titanium.
The List of all the guys she coulda-woulda-shoulda.
Now Oona can. She will. And she should.
The List. Because a few good men are the best revenge.

Montreal.
The gourmet capital of North America, where you don’t have to pay big bucks for the best eats.
The city of beautiful women and men, where you can buy eco-conscious fashion by local designers, if not for a song, then sometimes for a shockingly good price.
The endless fun of festivals, clubs, dancing on a mountain, or chilling out to yoga.
And oh yes, ze French. Beauty and joie de vivre in a gorgeous package.
So come discover Montréal, where the prices are low and the fun factor soars.

Includes the Derringer Award finalist, “Because.”

The hours are inhumane.
Thoracic surgeon: "Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down. Never lie down when you can sleep."

Orthopedic surgery resident: "We do 72 hours on call on the weekends...but if you just accept that you'll have no life for five years, it's not so bad."

Fellow medical student: "You have to decide when you're too tired to eat, or too hungry to sleep."

The people are insane.
Fellow medical student: "Yes, Dr. Job's the surgeon who asked the nurse for a sterile towel. She handed it to him. He thanked her, tossed the towel over the resident's face, and punched him through the drape, so that his fist would stay sterile. Then Dr. Job kept on operating." Pause. "But the he's always been very nice to me."

But you literally hold someone's life in your hands.

And the one thing that nobody told me before I plunged hands-first into my first surgical rotation, the thing I had to discover for myself, was that, compared to anything else in medicine:

Every blood-spattered second of surgery
is
so
much
fun.

One missing uncle. One missing child. And a river that could kill them both.

True tales from the emergency room, with a twist.
Just like Grey’s Anatomy, medicine with a little bit of sex.
And, like Fifty Shades of Grey, a tiny bit of torture.
Note: as an emergency doctor, I’m talking medicine spiced with G-rated sex. If patients wander into to the ER after sexual congress, something’s gone awry. I, personally, don’t mix sex and work. Other people may run around with whips and chains and red rooms of pain, but I’m a (cough) professional. As in, a medical professional. So please don’t think this book will get you off. Mostly, I’m writing about life in the emergency lane. I just like the title mash-up.
As for the torture, after you graduate, the infamous long hours and abusive staff mutate into different forms, especially for a female doctor. You trade up for problems. As you shall see.
Anything’s possible in the emergency room.
Come on in.
Oh, wait, that sounds bad, if there’s even a whiff of sex. How about…
Enter if you dare.
Shoot, that could be a come-on too. Never mind.
Want a snapshot of a world in free-fall? Turn the page.

When you can't eat, pray, or love.

I'm baaaaack.
That's right. You can't keep the Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World away.
Was I always such a hard-hearted lass? Of course not. I offer you some counter-examples from medical school, a time when I was so earnest and hard-working, I scraped my finger on the mannequin while practicing my digital rectal exam technique (true story).

Then I bring it into real time, swapping more short essays about the emergency room in the digital age, where Twitter co-exists with trauma and tendonitis.

If you enjoyed The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World and Other True Tales from the Emergency Room, or even if you didn't, come on in.

One of the best crime novels of 2016, as chosen by CBC's The Next Chapter.
Two doctors. One killer. One woman in labour.

This is the story about a plucky emergency doctor giving birth to two healthy babies—and all the whacked-out stuff that happens in between.

When I read other 'mumoirs', I laugh at the universal truisms: yep, tired. Ooh, a poopy diaper. But look, baby's smile! So worth it. Whoops, I'm pregnant again!

Is that my 20,000-word tale?

I wish.

Yes, I change diapers. Cloth diapers! And my husband changes more than his fair share.

But mostly, I'm an ecstatic new Momzilla carting my infant around as death and disease stalk and smite my family. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to save lives and conceive another baby.

Warning #1: this book is less about official doctor-ing and more about my unbalanced life (but funny! And plucky! Did I mention plucky?).

Warning #2: I wrote it as prose poems because I think poems are an excellent way to distill life into sharp, memorable lines. Also, thanks to babies and medicine, I hardly have my hands to myself, except when I'm sleeping. Poems are short. And I still need to sleep.

Come on in.

I have always yearned to visit Africa.

I want to watch lions prowl in their natural habitat. I want to gaze into an elephant’s eyes and witness a wise matriarch who has traversed the continent. I want to sit quietly with the silverback gorillas.

Instead, I finished medical school and residency, got married, and had kids. I dreamed of Africa, but figured it would stay a dream for another decade, until my teacher friend, Becky, said, “My school is going to South Africa. You could come.”

This is a short book of poems, mixed with occasional prose, about my travels in South Africa and Swaziland. From visiting a Mom and Baby clinic and surfing in Jeffrey’s Bay, to dissecting an impala in Moholoholo, to shopping in Swaziland, and culminating in a safari in Kruger National Park. Almost 100 percent as a tourist, instead of as a doctor. And that’s okay. As the African proverb goes, “Travel teaches how to see.”

“Scintillating…imaginative...V is a character who calls out for a series. At once Everywoman and Heroine...a marvellous comedy/adventure.” Richard Quarry, author of Midnight Choir

Wolf ice killed Leila's best friend. And now it's stealing Leila's self-control. A new werewolf bait drives her straight into the arms (and on to other anatomical parts) of her sizzling ex-boyfriend while other wers battle for their survival. Can she fight past the lust in order to save her species?

When love is too delicious to resist.

One belly dancing class.

Every Monday, on penalty of death or cheesecake.

Kate Zhao, the corporate lawyer, worries mostly about her billable hours and Asian no-ass syndrome...until she gets bushwhacked by a friend request on Facebook. Her best friend/first lover dumped her at age 17, but now that he's all grown up, he wants to make it up to her.

Hailey St. Laurent, the über-mother of an infant girl, barely makes time for their belly dancing class, until she figures out that she loves it more than her husband.

Gavriella Schumacher, the sassy Jewish engineer, picks up a guy who turns down the fornication. Is he crazy, or does she smell that bad?

Dancing Through the Chaos.
Sex. City. And a little bit of rhythm.

Jimmy can talk to animals. No big deal, probably part of his Mohawk heritage. He's been doing it for the past six years, and now he's just another 14-year-old too smart for school, a.k.a. jail.

But one day, Coyote tells him, "You have to go to school." She won't take no for an answer. "There's going to be trouble."

Turns out a bully's slashing his way through a hit list, starting with one of the vice principals, and closing in on Jimmy himself at number four.

Now Jimmy's got to protect them all--with some help from the birds and the beasts.

Luke Gallagher rules the world as the luckiest guy on the planet. Well, not literally. But he gets the grades, the girls, and the goals ever since he rubbed the belly of the Laughing Buddha statue in Chinatown at age 13.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe Buddha’s got his back. Either way, Luke’s golden for five long years--

--until his luck drops in the crapper on his first day of university. Now Luke's got to beat a bully, win back his best friend, pass his classes, and maybe, just maybe, find true love.

Buddha. Dude. Can you give a guy a break, one last time?

Only boys can tell fortunes. Actually, only one boy in a thousand. Until Julia Sharpe starts a fortunetelling revolution in the wild and wacky year of 1985.

Up 'til now, the only girls who told fortunes were lying, crazy, or both.

But Julia has to do something before her family's fortunetelling company tanks. Her brother Alistair says computers will rule the future. And more and people rebel against fortunetelling. They say, why should a few Gifted guys read the future and make everyone else pay for it?

Julia secretly applies for a fortunetelling correspondence course. Over the mail, no one can tell she's a girl. With the help of her tutor, she discovers she can read the future in a bowl of popcorn kernels. That's right, popcorn. It's like reading tea leaves, only she reads popcorn kernels. Weird but wonderful.

If she can do it, girls can read the future too. Maybe more boys, too, if they just got the right training. Now people won't hate them so much.

Julia's going to save the company—and the rest of world!

Right?

Julia Sharpe can tell the future using popcorn. That's right, popcorn. It's like using tea leaves, only cooler. But the cute new kid, Darwin Jones, makes all the fortunetellers sick. How can Julia save the day and get Darwin to fall in like with her at the same time?

Winner of the InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel (2008)

Max's To-Do List
1. Get born. Check.
2. Discover a magic hat. Check.
3. Defeat bullies who snatch the magic hat. Uh-oh...

A heart-warming picture book about a boy who takes on the bullies--and wins!

Winner of the Best Children's Literature award, sponsored by the Cornwall Public Library and the Cornwall and Region Writer’s Society.

If you yearn to hold your baby,

If your love still burns,

If your heart is broken,

Or if you want to comfort to someone walking this road,

This book is for you.

"Your Baby Is Safe" was written for anybody who has loved and lost a little one at any age.

Ah, the innocence of medical school. This is a story from my third year of clinical clerkship, when I started rotating through the hospital wards, starting with internal medicine. I was matched to the gastrointestinal team, so I can recite the bacterial causes of bloody diarrhea to this day.

One patient taught me about ulcerative colitis...and a few other things.

You can also find this essay in my book, The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World and Other True Tales from the Emergency Room.

In my first few months of indie publishing, I made zero dollars. That's right. The big donut.
But by the end of my first year, I'd grossed over $10,000, making me not a millionaire, but a thousandaire.
How? Hard work and a bit of good luck.
In this essay, I break down the recipe of how I made five figures in twelve months.
We can all profit from indie publishing. Not the same amount of money, and not on the same timeline, but every one of us can reap the rewards of this brave new world, selling directly to readers, which means pocketing the money both as authors and as publishers.
We can all be thousandaires together!

When Dr. Hope Sze trades the crime-ridden city of Montreal for a fishing trip with her dad, she expects misty lakes and crimson maple leaves. In other words, a perfect family fun day. Then Hope’s mother—never the sharpest scalpel in the neighbourhood—drags along crazy uncle Leonard, transforming Black Donald Lake into a very dark place.

Originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Who wants to lose a few pounds?
I do, I do!
Who wants to read about weight loss?
Um…
Look. I know where you're coming from. Doctors like me should get all excited about slimming down, but if you ask me to count calories or eat like a cavewoman, I sprint for the door. And after I finish sprinting, I want to eat more than a goji berry.
So I wrote this bite-sized book that sums up my entire weight loss philosophy in six words: eat right and get a dog. Okay, I wrote a little more than that, but I promise not to shame you or make up some complex system where you have to order a magic spoonful of powdered spinach from me every Tuesday at midnight.
Just read it. What have you got to lose, except a few inches, a few dollars, and a few degrees of self-loathing? Hooray!

Do you seethe with envy? Do you turn such a vibrant shade of green, staring at your friend's award-winning, New York Times bestselling books, that you kind of look like...broccoli?
Yeah. Me too.
Comparing yourself with other writers feels like comparing apples and broccoli.
Guess what? Apples taste pretty sweet. Everyone likes them. Apples seem like the cheerleaders who walk off with the quarterback every time, while you push your glasses up your broccoli nose, scribble poetry in your broccoli diary, and listen to your broccoli parents scream at each other.
Eesh.
This bite-sized book tells you how I kicked envy to the moon—well, not the moon. Okay. The front porch. Using my muscular yet shapely broccoli legs, I kicked envy to the porch so I could write my own work.
I became a rat with an island.
Are you more confused than envious now? Super. Consider my job half done. Complete my mission by buying this short yet sweet, broccoli-positive, rat-friendly book, so you, too, can annihilate envy, write your broccoli sonnets, and sing your broccoli songs forevermore.

When magical creatures need a cure, they journey to the Wizard's Hospital.

On a cold day in December, a mysterious man makes a pilgrimage to a hidden corner of Montreal, Canada. He has been walking for almost 2000 years and must negotiate a dwarf, a three-headed dog, and worse yet, pesky apprentices before reaching the poutine-loving wizard named Noah who might be able to help him.

On a cold day in December, a mysterious man makes a pilgrimage to a hidden corner of Montreal, Canada. He has been walking for almost 2000 years and must negotiate a dwarf, a three-headed dog, and worse yet, pesky apprentices before reaching the poutine-loving wizard named Noah who might be able to help him.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote about a girl who would have danced herself to death in a pair of magical red shoes if an executioner had not chopped her feet off. Have you ever wondered what happened to the shoes (and the feet) thereafter?

When magical creatures need a cure, they journey to the Wizard's Hospital.

On a sweltering day in July, a pair of red shoes dance in the tower of the Wizard's Hospital. Leah Chang, the wizard's apprentice, brings the shoes to audition for the Royal Academy of Magical Ballet.

Chaos ensues.

When Melanie's mother dumps her at the Little Flower Preparatory College for Girls, Melanie can handle the uniforms and the 6 a.m. wake-up calls. But when the nuns' discipline turns savage and Melanie discovers that the parents have essentially abandoned them, Melanie must save herself and her best friend, even if it means consorting with a vampire.

Jenny died of anorexia, but she didn't stay dead.
She's back and she's warning the world about her deadly disease.
Josh, the media-savvy reporter, helps her get the message out...and falls in love with her drive, her sass, and funny little streaks of innocence.
Can Jenny save the world from anorexia?
Can Josh save her from herself?

When a tyrant overtakes her space colony, Emma Lo strikes back with her art.

She employs nanotechnology to transform her nearly century-old body so that she may play Othello in a desperate bid to satirize and overthrow the President—until someone hacks Emma's com link and begins to blackmail her.

A cat-and-mouse game in a 4000-word rapier of a short story where Emma's life and spirit are at stake and, to quote the Scottish play, she "cannot fly, /But, bear-like...must fight the course."

What if...your best friend was a long, thin slice of dill pickle and you played with him every night in your dreams?
What if...this world became more real than the one you're in right now?
What if...Pickle Joe took you swimming up the Amazon River and the piranhas attacked you?

A thousand word-story about pickles, piranhas, and parents.

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin.

How do you solve a problem like your mother?

A ferocious flash fiction story.

Accompanied by an exclusive essay by the author on the exhausted genesis of the story at Kris Rusch and Dean Smith's Oregon mystery workshop, the writing life, and the Derringer short list.

Ma liste à faire
1. Naître
2. Découvrir un chapeau magique
3. Vaincre les brutes qui arrachent son chapeau magique. (Oh non!)
~Max

Max et son chapeau magique: livre primé d’un garçon qui confront des brutes et gagne!

Seven-year-old Trenton Lo loves basketball and Star Wars and most of all, his family and Guangdong Barbecue, the restaurant they’re desperately trying to run in an unfashionable corner of Toronto, Canada. Until one day, Trenton opens the door to their rather evil fairy godfather.

Drugs. Alcohol. Violence. Chaos.

All in a night’s work for Dr. Hope Sze, aspiring Montreal emergency physician—until someone tries to strangle her with her own stethoscope.

Then Hope’s lover disappears.

A second woman barely escapes throttling before her beloved vanishes too.

Hope slogs through the pneumonia and hemorrhoid patients cramming the ER while a psychopath stalks the empty, post-midnight hallways of St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Waiting. Waiting patiently.

Until everything explodes.

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Fresh out of jail and off drugs, Fred Redish embarks on a new life. First up: getting to know his two young sons, who are under the custody of his mother-in-law. Problem is, she poisons them against Mohawks in general and Fred in particular. Does he have to kill her to get his boys back?

"Impressive...moving"--Publisher's Weekly

A fast, funny guide on how to turn your back around, written by an emergency doctor.

A dead man in the snow shatters Dr. Hope Sze’s peaceful month of research at an Ottawa stem cell lab.

One man’s body leads to a series of corpses, both at home and around the globe.

This time, the killer knows no borders and no conscience.

Hope must extricate them all, while caught between the man who saved her life, the man who helps rebuild it, and a killer on an intercontinental rampage.

Two Shaolin monks exiled to outer space try to keep up their traditions, including kung fu, on their way to answer an alien communication signal. But when Little Tiger falls ill, they must reinvent their approach in order to survive.

Find relief in this fast, funny book by Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes, outlining causes and cures for the dry eyes that afflict up to 1 in 4 Canadians.

Award-winning author and physician, Melissa Yuan-Innes, explores the strange new worlds of embryo transplantation ("Red"), human-ape genetic engineering ("Growing Up Sam"), and exile (two Shaolin monks banished to outer space in "Iron Monk") in an exclusive collection of her science fiction stories.

Every Hallowe'en, Mrs. Marigold invites only six children to her mansion. One boy, Adam, warns Ashley away, but her parents, desperate to get in good with the richest woman in town, force her to go.
Trick or treat?
Trick. Definitely trick.
The question is if Ashley can get out alive.

A pregnant teenager donates her embryo to a recipient mother who wants red-haired children. The doctor who pioneered the technology performs the microsurgery exquisitely.

Everyone should live happily ever after.

Except this isn't a fairy tale.

"Red," a short story originally published in Nature's Future science fiction section.

“Sizzling! I read the whole thing in one day, heart pounding, totally gripped by the action.” —Dr. Eileen Sacks, General Surgeon

Is love stronger than bootlegging, ghosts, and murder?

All Octavia “V” Ling wants for the holidays? Inner peace and a piece of the sizzling spy named Dario.
Since gingerbread men will dance the cha cha before Dario swears his undying devotion, V jets off to Goa, India, ready to rock the handstands with a yogini named Raven.
Only Raven disappears.
So V befriends an elephant and his mahout. They vanish in the middle of V's first yoga class.
Just in time for Dario to materialize on the ashram doorstep.
Did the Yoga Love School transform into the Yoga Leaving School? Or will Octavia and Dario uncover far more dastardly machinations, deep in the incense-burning, paan-spitting, curry-scented recesses of Mother India?
Spies! Lies! Yoga! Elephants! And the two people who might save them all: V, the lovesick Canadian civil servant, and Dario, the man of mystery.
The Goa Yoga School of Slayers. The hilarious, pulse-pounding sequel to The Italian School for Assassins.

'Tis the season for eggnog and envy.

One doctor plunges through the looking glass. And the scalpel. And an online game of truth or dare.

New, blistering, darkly funny essays breaking bones. And fixing them. And the seamy underside of life in the emergency room, with its cornucopia of crazy cases, not just bone-centred ones. For example, the man who tried to eat his own thumb and the case of bleeding brains.

Warnings: 1. Broken Bones bears no authorized resemblance to any TV show. 2. If the previous Unfeeling Doctor books were rated PG-13, Broken Bones gets slapped with a Restricted label. Medical noir. With cussing, selfishness, and jokes from the sewer. 3. Don’t read it.

When my father--the smart, strong, mostly silent type--got diagnosed with a brain tumor a few months after his 56th birthday, I figured we'd ended up with the worst Christmas present ever. Instead, he and my infant son taught me the most important Christmas lesson of all.

An inspirational tale originally published in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book.

It sounds like the easiest mission ever:

1. Go to Earth (you know, the blue planet in the middle of nowhere).
2. Sell hot dogs.
3. Record interactions with human beings using the loop recorder in his brain.

Unfortunately, humans refuse to buy Charlie’s hot dogs at the corner of Bay and College Street in downtown Toronto, Canada, North America, Earth.

They prefer Earl’s Dogs, the cart across the street.

Charlie can’t understand it. The Leader has provided him with a superior human form, a tall, tan male modelled after that guy on Baywatch, once Earth’s most popular show.

Charlie’s hot dogs are a quarter cheaper. Capitalism in action.

Charlie offers chilis and barbecue sauce, which Earl does not.

And so the war of the hot dogs begins.

Charlie did not land on this planet in order to fail.

Humans ’n’ Hot Dogs: a light, funny finalist for the Roswell Award for Short Science Fiction 2016

'Cause sometimes you need to laugh. Even if it's at the aliens.

Amazon.ca: https://amzn.to/3iXswQG

Amazon.uk: https://amzn.to/2ZgnG9f

A story of three women, linked by blood and diamonds.

At West Vincent High School, the power couple ain’t the prom king and queen.
The head janitor, Gordon Pinchuk, rules the roost, harassing everyone from the principal down to the students.
Gordon saves some special grief for Birdie, the one female janitor.
Good thing Birdie’s got more than a cleaning rag stuffed up her sleeve, ‘cause this war between the janitors won’t end ’til one of them’s laid out.

Camping can kill you.

A Killer Flight With No Way Out

When Dr. Hope Sze flies to Los Angeles to reunite with her soul mate, she expects Botoxed blondes with Brazilian wax jobs, not terror at 35,000 feet in the air.

Yet on their way home, with 1000 miles to go and nowhere to land, she and Dr. John Tucker must strive to save one man’s life.

Hope and Tucker have no surgical equipment. No surgeon on board. And, as first year family medicine residents, almost no experience.

But right this second, they’ll try anything.

Especially Hope, because minutes before, she might have accidentally helped to kill the man spasming at her feet.

A sociopath on the loose.

Dr. Valerie Chia strides into St. Joseph's emergency room expecting the usual Montreal Monday morning chaos. Nothing she and the other day doctor can't handle, with the help of the nurses and a little coffee.

Until the other day doctor doesn't show up. And one of the overnight patients crashes. And the shiny new resident doctor, Hope Sze, tries to save the patient’s airway, but just might end up killing the woman instead.

Debut episode (half-hour pilot script) of a medical radio drama featuring Dr. Hope Sze, by Melissa Yi, a.k.a. Melissa Yuan-Innes, the emergency physician and award-winning author.

"Wonderful."--Greg Smith, M.D.
"Valuable."--The Ultimate Reading List for Nurses
Now an audio book on Audible or at Gumroad.