JL / Jennifer Lycette is a novelist, award-winning essayist, rural physician, wife, and mom. She received a degree in biochemistry from the University of San Francisco and attained her medical degree at the University of Washington. Her medical science and cancer-physician background lent itself nicely to her journey of becoming a medical thriller author.
Mid-medical-career, she discovered narrative medicine in her path back from physician burnout and has been writing ever since. She never dreamed she would join the ranks of medical thriller authors, but somehow, the writing led to one book and then another. She continues to practice community medical oncology in rural Oregon.
THE ALGORITHM WILL SEE YOU NOW, released March 2023, is her first novel and garnered significant recognition, including:
- 2023 Screencraft Cinematic Book Competition Finalist
- 2023 Best Thrillers(dot)com Finalist (medical thriller category)
- 2023 Maxy Awards Finalist (Thriller category)
- 2023 Page Turner Book Awards Finalist (Best Debut Novel category)
- 2023 Readers’ Favorite Bronze Medal Winner (Fiction – Thriller – Medical genre)
- 2024 Nancy Pearl Published Book Award Finalist (Best Book, Genre Fiction)
Her second novel, THE COMMITTEE WILL KILL YOU NOW, released November 2023 and is the prequel to Algorithm, (although the books can be read in either order). It was a recommended selection by International Thriller Writers’ The Big Thrill in November 2023, and a 2024 Readers’ Favorite Bronze Medal Winner in the Fiction-Social Issues genre.
Her first speculative short story/flash fiction can be found in the anthology And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative (Alternating Current Press). A little story about motherhood and cyborgs… (yes, you read that right).
Another of her speculative fiction short stories close to her heart was published in The Intima Fall 2022: No Human Bias Involved. What will healthcare look like when treatment decisions are made by AI? A nurse learns the painful truth in this timely futuristic tale.
In addition to her published fiction, she also has contributed to nonfiction medical anthologies. Learn more about all her books here.
Before she became an author of medical thrillers, her first writing love was the personal essay, and her many published essays can be found in top journals including Intima, NEJM, JAMA and others; and online at Doximity and Medscape.
She is a member of ITW (International Thriller Writers), the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and an alumna of the 2019 Pitch Wars Mentoring program.