A Simple Cure engages the reader in the search for the cure of malignant melanoma. While an uncommon skin cancer, one American dies of melanoma almost every hour (every 61 minutes). The incidence rate has tripled in the last twenty years. When nature, in her ultimate act of irony, strikes Richard Powell, a cancer specialist, with malignant melanoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer, his wife, Terri devotes her life to curing the disease that ultimately kills her husband. While research laboratories are characterized as noble in search of cures, and proprietary drug companies are caricatured as ruthless and materialistic, too often, the distinctions aren't so clear. The murder of a drug courier to obtain an experimental and promising treatment for malignant melanoma, unleashes a chain of devastating consequences. People for Alternative Treatment, a company created to find cures for rare diseases, had fallen on hard times and become a subsidiary of Kendall Pharmaceuticals, a company with very different values. Experimentation with a vaccine against tuberculosis is showing surprising effects in controlling malignant melanoma at PAT and UC Medical Center. Kendall is enthralled with the economic potential of such a treatment, while researchers are leery and have many unanswered questions. Kendall's determination to push the vaccine into clinical trial at all costs is in conflict with Terri and her ethical associates. When clinical trials begin, the vaccine's effects are miraculous. Soon, however, once again, we see the rule of unintended consequences.

Dr. Abbie Adler had chosen general, child, and adolescent psychiatrist to treat sexually abused girls. As a victim of such abuse herself, Abbie's insights make her an effective therapist. In addition, her practice includes adult patients and provides group and individual therapy for a broad range of psychiatric problems including depression, personality disorders, psychopathy, and malignant narcissism. On a December evening, the Berkeley Police find Abbie sitting in her car at Inspiration Point overlooking the East Bay of San Francisco. She's bruised and catatonic. They transport her to Brier Hospital where they admit her to the psychiatric ward. The nature of her condition, and its cause, remain a mystery. After standard treatments fail, her psychiatrist recommends electroshock therapy. Finally, she awakens but remembers nothing of the month preceding. In addition, she discovers significant memory gaps from the past few years. Abbie had been treating two victims of the Chabot rapist who targeted girls and as she's making progress in their care, unbelievably, someone abducts and strangles them. Their deaths devastate Abbie. During Abbie's difficult recovery, memories of past events gradually return. They are fragmentary and torture her with memory flashes and nightmares. Gradually, she begins to suspect that one of her adult patients may be the strangler. When the police find Abbie's prime suspect brutally murdered, both she and the police are befuddled. Abbie struggles to discover the identity of the strangler and those who may be abetting his actions. Will he/they get away with it?

Even in the age of the genome and sophisticated biotechnology, medical progress still moves at a snail's pace. Seasoned investigators are matured by experience and they accept the virtue of the too-slow scientific process. The young, however have been brought up in a world of instant gratification, and they barrel ahead never looking back to see the havoc in their wake. So it is with Dr. Harmony Lane. In her single-minded obsession to cure her patients, she cuts corners and treats a desperately ill woman with an experimental viral vector provided by an unscrupulous research scientist. While he shares her impatience, he cares nothing for her humanistic sensibilities. She uses a similar vector on her patients with autoimmune diseases. While the vector has remarkable curative properties, it soon becomes clear that it has devastating and lethal side effects. The race is on to cure or at least control the vector before it kills again. The novel proves, once again, that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."