About Judith
I am a nurse by training and served on the front lines in community hospitals and then as a civilian nurse at the US Army’s lead infectious Disease Institute (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland managing the “special immunizations” program. Because the mission of USAMRIID was to develop defenses against biological weapons and my job was to provide counsel and to administer vaccines that would help protect against diseases like anthrax, botulism, and smallpox to scientists, soldiers and various “others”, I became interested in the history of biological warfare.
When my husband and co-author Frank returned from inspections of illegal biological weapons facilities in the former Soviet Union and Iraq, and having met some of his colleagues and eventually one of his “foes” turned defector, Dr. Ken Alibek, I decided there were told and untold stories that I would capture in Crescent Veil. Writing fiction, for me, is letting my right brain go free after years of being held prisoner while raising children and watching the nursing profession become more about paper than patients. I presently split my time between southeastern North Carolina, southern New Hampshire, and travel; the source of much of my inspiration.
I received my bachelors degree in nursing from Graceland University, Independence, MO.
Crescent Veil was written with the assistance of my husband, Dr. Frank J. Malinoski, a distinguished medical virologist who also worked for USAMRIID for six years. Frank served on the first trilateral inspection team that visited suspected (now confirmed) biological weapons facilities in Russia in 1991, and later that year—at the invitation of the UN—he was part of the first United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection team that went into Iraq to investigate Saddam’s biological weapons program. In addition to being a consultant for Richard Preston’s books The Cobra Event and The Demon in the Freezer, he has appeared on PBS’s “Frontline” series “Plague Wars,” and been an advisor on numerous medical articles about biological weapons. His “day job” since 1992 has been as a physician in pharmaceutical medicine, developing vaccines and other medicines to help protect against the daily infectious disease threats that nature has devised on its own and currently he has his own consulting business, helping emerging companies with their challenges.
Frank received his undergraduate degree in biology from Colby College, Waterville, ME, his doctorate in microbiology from Rutgers, The Statue University and the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, and his medical degree from Albany Medical College, Albany, NY. He served in the US Army’s medical corps on active duty from 1981 through 1992 and then in the Army Reserve through 2008.
