AUBURN – The Auburn Public Library will welcome best-selling author Tess Gerritsen, one of today’s most popular writers of medical thrillers, at 6:30 p.m. Monday, April 9.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Gerritsen went on to medical school at the University of California in San Francisco, where she earned her medical degree in 1979. After completing her internal medicine residency, she worked as a physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.

While on maternity leave, she began to write fiction. In 1987, Gerritsen published her first novel, “Call After Midnight,” a romantic thriller, which was soon followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, “Adrift,” which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

It was a chance dinner conversation that inspired Tess to write her first medical thriller. The man sitting beside her at the restaurant was an ex-police officer who ran a security service protecting American businessmen in Russia. On his last trip abroad, Moscow police told him that Russian orphans were vanishing from the streets. They believed the children were being kidnapped by the Russian mafia and shipped abroad as organ donors.

The story so horrified Gerritsen that she immediately called her brother-in-law, a reporter for Newsweek, suggesting he investigate. Newsweek was unable to track down any proof. Weeks later, Gerritsen was still unable to forget those missing Russian orphans. They became the inspiration for the plot of her first medical thriller, “Harvest,” published in 1996, which marked Tess’s debut on the New York Times best-seller list. Film rights were sold to Paramount/Dreamworks, and the book was translated into 20 foreign languages.

Now retired from medicine, Gerritsen writes full time. She and her family live in Camden.

Gerritsen’s visit is part of the Annie Prescott Discussion series and is sponsored by Percy Books in Lewiston. For more information, call the library at 333-6640. The library is at 49 Spring St.