Tom Combs’ career as a hard-working ER physician provides the foundation for his unforgettable characters and riveting plots. His emotional engagement arises from 25 years of battling to help and comfort those facing illness, trauma and tragedy.
To earn his way to medical school, Tom worked jobs using jackhammers, chainsaws, and heavy machinery. He then shifted to laboratory equipment and, eventually, to the stethoscope, scalpel and other tools of the Emergency Medicine specialist.
His current weapons of choice are the keyboard and a dangerously fertile imagination.
Nerve Damage, his debut thriller, immerses the reader in high-level intrigue and edge-of-your seat suspense. The events are tomorrow’s headlines credible with surprises unfolding to the final page.
Prior to medicine Tom worked in road construction, warehouses, sandblasting, demolition and stints as a lumberjack and foundry worker. While in training he was a biochemistry teaching assistant and subsequently a laboratory research assistant to the dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Pharmacognosy (the science of discovering, studying and developing drugs derived from natural sources).
Tom’s internship year was served at Hennepin County Medical Center where he was introduced to the fledgling specialty of Emergency Medicine. For the next three years he received further intense specialty training and served as an air rescue “flight physician” in the University of Cincinnati EM residency program. For most of the next twenty years he worked as a physician in the ER of North Memorial Medical Center’s top-ranked level one trauma and medical facility. He is proud of his affiliation with what he considers to be three of the top institutions for Emergency Medicine in the country.
Tom committed the last several years to refining his writing skills. The author-educators of the Loft Literary Center provided invaluable instruction and support (Mary Carroll Moore, Ellen Hart, William Kent Krueger, David Housewright, the late Vince Flynn, and dozens more).
Additionally Michel Stanley, author of the award-winning Detective Kubu mystery series, and renowned author/educator, James Scott Bell, have been generous sources of writing wisdom.
Tom lives with his artist wife near family and friends in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Visit his website at www.tom-combs.com
