Bloody Hell — A Novel
A personal crisis with global consequences.
Skyler Longview, CEO of Blackwell Pharmaceuticals, has built his life on mastering outcomes. That control collapses after a luxury honeymoon in Zavari—an island nation off the East African coast—when his wife, Mimi, is infected with a rare, deadly virus during a safari encounter with two mandrills.
The infection appears accidental. It isn’t. Zavari’s president orchestrated the incident to force Skyler to develop a cure—one his own daughter desperately needs.
With less than a year to save Mimi, Skyler launches the largest global drug race in modern history—spanning labs, boardrooms, and geopolitical backchannels. Publicly, he brands the initiative as an ethical pivot, positioning Blackwell as a leader in rare disease research. Privately, it is a race to save his wife.
To secure the only viable research model—infected Zavarian mandrills—Skyler enters a volatile alliance with Zavari’s president. But as that alliance fractures and the virus slips beyond containment, private negotiations escalate into a global crisis.
The story is told through the dry, incisive voice of Skyler’s corporate bodyguard, Derek Davenport—an observer trained to protect power, not question it. As the moral cost of Skyler’s decisions mounts, Derek is pulled from the perimeter into the fallout.
Bloody Hell blends the institutional unease of Birnam Wood with the morally charged medical suspense of Robin Cook and the class-conscious intrigue of The Doorman.
From First Line to Final Draft: How Bloody Hell Took Shape
The First Line: A Winner Who Finally Loses
While studying fiction with my longtime tutor, Martha Hughes, I set out to write my first short story. At the time, I was focused on adapting a screenplay to what would become my debut novel, but Martha insisted I pause and write a short story first. So I sat down, opened my laptop, and typed:
“Skyler had always been a winner. He had experienced momentary setbacks and a few false starts but never the bitter seeds of defeat in all his forty years.”
The story became “Turning Mimi,” about a pharmaceutical CEO racing to save his wife from a fatal virus. The setup worked. Skyler worked. But halfway through, the plot veered spectacularly off course—a vampire appeared and derailed everything.
Old Draft, New Beginning
Nearly two decades later, when I left corporate life to write full-time, I combed through my folder of 100+ story ideas and rediscovered “Turning Mimi.” The bones were still there: a story about ambition, secrecy, and the illusion of control.
But the vampire had to go.
As I did with Playing by the Book, I developed it first as a screenplay—titled Betting the Pharma—to make sure it held together. It did.
Voice and Perspective
I’d always wanted to write about the power games I witnessed in Corporate America. The screenplay provided the framework for the story, but turning it into a novel meant answering a big question: whose perspective would it be told from?
Skyler, the CEO was tempting—but at the start of the book, he’s not someone I’d want to crawl inside. I couldn’t expect the reader to want that either.
Instead, I chose a different lens: Skyler’s bodyguard. Someone close enough to power to see how it operates, but distant enough to watch it unravel. The result? Fewer speeches, more danger—and the perfect vantage point to witness control fall apart.
Research Behind the Fiction
Bloody Hell also draws from real-world research. I spoke with a pharmaceutical scientist, former Secret Service and CIA agents, and CEOs to ground the story in authentic science and high-stakes realism.
The line between control and chaos is thinner than most people think.
It took years, but Skyler Longview’s story finally came together—as Bloody Hell.