James K. Rone

James K. Rone is a physician and writer living outside Nashville TN with his wife, Susan, on their farm with 3 horses, 2 cats, and a dog named Emma. Dr. Rone was born and raised in Columbia SC, son of a hard-nosed city editor of the civil rights era. He is a graduate of the Univ. of SC, with a BS in biology, and the Univ. of SC School of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency and endocrinology fellowship programs at Air Force hospitals in Biloxi MS and San Antonio TX, respectively. He is board-certified in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He served 11 years active duty with the U.S. Air Force, rising to the rank of Lt. Colonel (select), and serving as Chief of Endocrinology and Asst. Chief of Medicine, at Keesler AFB Medical Center, MS. Upon separating from the Air Force in 1998, Dr. Rone joined Murfreesboro Medical Clinic, 1 of the 5 largest medical practices in the Nashville metropolitan area, and effective July 2012, he sits on their board of directors.

Dr. Rone's papers have appeared in peer-reviewed medical journals and he contributed a chapter to the SAUNDER'S MANUAL OF MEDICAL PRACTICE, 1st and 2nd editions. In 2007 he published his first book, THE THYROID PARADOX, a nonfiction guide for patients who have (like Dr. Rone himself) hypothyroidism. And though he plans to continue publishing medical nonfiction, Dr. Rone's passion as a writer is what he calls 'Southern Noir' fiction--inspired by, for example, James Dickey's novel DELIVERANCE. In fact Dr. Rone, as a college undergraduate, once had breakfast with Dickey, and he canoed down the river where the film version of Dickey's novel was shot, with his father and others, including his current wife's childhood friend (20 years before he met Susan, completely independently, in another state--but that's another story).

Specifically Dr. Rone is penning a series of SHERRY RUSSELL THRILLERS set in the 1960s, featuring a disgraced Nashville nurse turned hard-boiled private eye. Think PSYCHO's Janet Leigh, crossed with Scarlett O'Hara and Lisbeth Salander. Sherry's 1st outing is NO NICE GIRLS (2012) in which she tackles both the Sicilian and Dixie Mafias together on the Mississippi Gulf Coast of 1965. Dr. Rone lived for nearly a decade blocks off the Biloxi Strip, steeped in tales and grisly news accounts of the Dixie Mafia, elements of which TN Sheriff Buford Pusser famously battled in the real-life basis of the WALKING TALL movies. KLAVERN (also published in 2012) in the 2nd Sherry Russell novel, in which the feminist detective--now a bored suburban Nashville housewife--joins the investigation of the "Lavonia Massacre," a brutal Klan murder in rural Alabama, at the behest of the sister of one of the victims, who happens to be Sherry's "help." It has been said the "quintessence of noir" is that the truth makes things worse. In the course of KLAVERN Sherry encounters FBI duplicity in dealing with the killers--part of the odd historical paradox that the FBI was just as engaged in destroying Martin Luther King as it was the Klan, through much of the 1960s. The Lavonia case opens our heroine's hazel eyes wide to a growing plague of official secrecy and corruption that will explode in the planned 3rd novel in the series--involving Nazis and the Apollo space program in 1968 Huntsville AL.