“Scott gives us a look at the way men love, told from perspectives we rarely
see by an author intimately familiar with his subjects. The Hard Times propels the reader
forward with its intensity while remaining both literate and profound.”
~ Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
Doctor plays the most dangerous game
in The Hard Times
The Hard Times is, first and foremost, a novel about how men love. It focuses not on simple lust nor affection, but the complex web of expectations, loyalty, duty, and desire that define the society of men, how they love women, how they love their families, and how they bind themselves to one another in friendship and in war.
Taken from the news, declassified CIA documents, and the author’s personal experiences in Africa and Namibia, it is a fictional story superimposed on what’s actually happening in the diamond trade, today, where international politics and industry, play a strange game of hide and seek with illegal stones.
It begins in Mississippi. Ray Moffett is an ER doc, and Ray is facing an abyss. When his best friend and former boss comes into the ER dead, just six weeks after his retirement party, Ray finds himself searching for meaning in his own life. All Ray has left is his work. Work, punctuated only by the occasional round of golf. That’s all he can see stretching between him and his own trip to the grave if something doesn’t change.
A chance meeting with an African hunting guide, Fritz Dietrich, shows Ray a second chance to live the adventures he’d dreamed of as a boy. Dreams that were fueled by books written by men like Hemmingway, Ruark, and Capstick. Unfortunately, Fritz isn’t exactly what he seems.
Ray finds himself hunting desert oryx in the Namib with Fritz, both men trapped. Fritz must kill Ray and use his papers to smuggle illegal diamonds. For Ray to get home alive, he’s going to have to kill Fritz and then, somehow find his way out of the most hostile desert on the face of the earth.
Advance Praise
“It was wonderful. At last, a doctor that tells us what it is that he knows that we don’t know, and it’s a page-turner. I loved it. Hurrah!”
~ Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the American Book Award
“Scott gives us a look at the way men love, told from perspectives we rarely see by an author intimately familiar with his subjects. The Hard Times propels the reader forward with its intensity while remaining both literate and profound.”
~ Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
“Every physician is an observer and chronicler of the human condition...and then a few doctors also happen to be great storytellers. Scott fills that description. The Hard Times does not fit in any niche category...not strictly a crime novel, not a medical drama, nor simply a wonderful study in characters and emotions...Somehow it manages to be all these things and to come straight from the heart of a healing soul.”
~ Dwalia South M.D., author of Una Voce
“With The Hard Times, Russell Scott has written a luminous novel that casts a penetrating light on men and the things and the people they love. Moving with skill and deftness from the rich lushness of Mississippi to the terrifyingly beautiful Namibian dessert it is that increasingly rare art form – a book that offers a moving and penetrating glimpse into a man’s soul. I loved it from beginning to end.”
~ Deborah Johnson, author of The Secret of Magic
About
The Author
RUSSELL SCOTT ANDERSON, M.D. is a radiation oncologist who serves as the medical director of Anderson Cancer Center in Meridian, Miss. He is a former Navy diver who worked in operations in the Middle East, Central America, and in support of the Navy’s EOD community, SEALS, the U.S. Army’s Green Berets, the Secret Service, and the New York Police Department at various times during his time in the service.
The father of seven has written the family oriented literary columns Una Voce and The Uncommon Thread in the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association. He has also served the Journal as the chairman of the editorial advisory board. A collection of his columns was published as The Uncommon Thread in 2012. He has also written as screenwriter R.S. Anderson on several feature films, he is the author of the novels Timedonors Wanted and The Hard Times under the pseudonym Russell Scott, and is the editor of the literary journal China Grove.
