Option 2 — "The Journal." One of two design directions, September 2026. All five pages work. Use the menu to move between them. Sample blog posts and the book cover are stand-ins, clearly marked.
Carlotta Rinke.
Novelist

Carlotta Rinke

I spent thirty years in medicine, and the last stretch of it reading the data behind its promises. A great deal of it did not hold up. Now I write fiction about what happens when nobody checks.

Physician, hospital executive, and recovering optimist about the business of American healthcare. My first novel, Rebecca's Treatment, is with my developmental editor.

Carlotta Rinke
FIG. 01  Carlotta Rinke · PhotosByLani
A Novel
Rebecca's
Treatment
Carlotta Rinke
Placeholder cover — a real one gets designed when the book sells.
In developmental edit

Rebecca's Treatment

An accomplished biomedical engineer and elite athlete shatters her knee on a mountain bike. After several failed surgeries, the orthopedic surgeon who runs the biotech company where she works replaces the joint with an experimental therapy.

The results are extraordinary. Within weeks she is not merely recovered — she is stronger and faster than she was before the fall. Then she returns to competition under dubious circumstances, and learns that the surgeon has not told her the truth about what is in her knee.

Now she has to find an antidote before the treatment finishes what it started.

30+
Years in medicine
2
Hospital C-suite roles
CMO · Chief Quality Officer
3
Short stories
1
Novel in developmental edit
01Why this book

I did not start out a skeptic.

I spent the last stretch of my medical career as a senior medical director at a national insurer, where part of my job was to check what health-technology companies claimed their products did against what the population data actually showed.

Often, the statements and the data the start-ups presented were half-baked, premature, and untested in larger populations. I became a skeptic.

That is the soil this novel grew in. It is not a book against science — I spent a career inside it, and I believe in it. It is a book about what happens to patients when the guardrails around research give way, and when the people holding the money are the ones deciding what counts as proof.

02Also writing

Short fiction, and a second novel

Short stories

The Anatomy Lab · Making Amends · Church Wars

Three stories, several entered in competition, drawn from three decades of medicine and the people it puts in a room together.

In progress

The letters

A second novel built from my father's letters home from the Pacific and my mother's letters back from St. Louis, where she went to work in the defense plants and came out of the war with her own money.

Commentary

Off Label

Essays on healthcare, technology, and the stories we are sold. Published here, and occasionally in Desert Health News.

"You think about them for several hours, talk about them, and then they're forgotten." — my father, on the men he watched die in New Guinea
03Stay in touch

News about the book.

When the book finds a home, you will hear from me. No schedule, nothing sold, nothing shared.

This form works on the finished site. Nothing happens in the preview.
About

One career,
not two.

I write fiction now. The medicine came first, and it is the reason the fiction has teeth.

Carlotta Rinke
FIG. 02  Carlotta Rinke · PhotosByLani
01The medicine

I started at the bedside, in geriatrics, which is the branch of medicine that teaches you fastest how little of it is really about the disease. From there I moved into hospital leadership, first as a chief quality officer and then as a chief medical officer, and finally to a national insurer as a senior medical director working in population health.

That last job is the one that changed how I see the industry. I was handed the claims of health-technology start-ups and asked whether the data supported them. Often it did not. I learned to read a press release the way you read a chart — looking for what is missing.

I retired from clinical medicine in 2022. I still consult on digital health and mentor start-ups, which keeps me current.

Through all of it I kept notes. Thirty years of them: patients, physicians, families, boardrooms, and the particular politics of institutions that believe they are above politics. It turns out that is a treasure trove, and it is where the fiction comes from.

02The writing

My first novel, Rebecca's Treatment, is a medical thriller about a woman whose body becomes the experiment. It is with my developmental editor now. Underneath the plot it is about something I watched for decades: powerful men deciding what happens to women's bodies, for money, and calling it innovation.

I have written three short stories — The Anatomy Lab, Making Amends, and Church Wars — and I am at work on a second novel drawn from my parents' wartime letters.

What I am after, as a writer, is complex characters, a plot worth following, and language that moves. Kristin Hannah's The Women and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles are the books I measure myself against.

I write about the "what ifs" that appear when the guardrails around scientific research give way.
03Where you will find me

In the valley, mostly

BoardBoard Member, Palm Springs Writers Guild — a community of aspiring and accomplished authors, and the reason my chapters get read by people who will tell me the truth.
EditorMedical Editor, Desert Health News, a Palm Springs quarterly.
CivicMember, Human Rights Commission, City of Palm Springs, where I advocate for access to healthcare as a human right.
HomeThe Coachella Valley, with regular escapes to Idyllwild. Mother of two daughters and grandmother of three granddaughters.
A Novel
Rebecca's
Treatment
Carlotta Rinke
Placeholder cover. A real one is designed once the book has a publisher — this is just so the page isn't empty.
In developmental edit

Rebecca's Treatment

A medical thriller about a woman whose body becomes the experiment.

Complete manuscript with my developmental editor. Querying agents once her notes are in.

01The story

Rebecca is a biomedical engineer and an elite athlete — a woman defined by precision in both halves of her life. A mountain-biking crash destroys her knee. Two reconstructions fail. Her athletic career is over and her marriage is not far behind.

Then the orthopedic surgeon who runs the biotech company where she works offers her an experimental knee replacement.

The results are impossible. Within weeks Rebecca is not merely recovered — she is stronger, faster, and sharper than she was at her peak. She returns to competition, wins, and is stripped of the result for doping, though no known drug is ever found in her blood.

What she finds instead is a shipment of human embryos arriving at her own laboratory, and three military men who received the same implant she did. Two of them have turned violent. The cells are migrating to the brain.

Rebecca is a walking time bomb, and the only person who can build the antidote is her.

A woman combating the manipulative forces of powerful men who try to control the destinies of women for the sake of greed, profit, pleasure, and blind ambition.The theme, in my words
02What it is about, underneath
Not anti-science

Innovation matters. I spent a career inside it. But leaders have to respect the FDA, the IRB, and the ethics of their own profession — and this is a story about what happens when they don't.

The money

Private equity in medicine. Luxury healthcare and boutique practices built around enhancement rather than healing. A wellness industry that is a powerful lobby resting on belief and very little science.

Agency

Rebecca's flaw is ambition, and she is attracted to powerful men like a moth to a naked light bulb. She is not only a victim of this story. She helped build it.

03Where it stands

The publishing road

Honest version. Publishing is slow and nobody pretends otherwise.

StageDetail
Complete

Manuscript drafted

Chapters workshopped through a critique group over many months.

Sept 2026

Sent to my developmental editor

Critique-group notes folded in first.

Now

Developmental edit

Editor's notes expected at the end of September.

Next

Querying agents

Submission to literary agents representing medical and commercial thrillers.

After that

Publication

Where it lands depends on the book. Either way, this page changes.

04Short fiction

Three stories

Short story

The Anatomy Lab

Entered in competition.

Short story

Making Amends

Entered in competition.

Short story

Church Wars

Entered in competition.

Excerpts can go here once you decide which ones you want readers to see.

05Follow the book

Know when you can read it.

Leave your email and I will write to you when the book has a publisher and a date.

This form works on the finished site. Nothing happens in the preview.
Off Label

on healthcare, technology,
and the stories we're sold

Off label is what we call a drug prescribed outside what it was approved for. Sometimes that is good medicine and sometimes it is not, which seemed like the right name for writing about the difference.

01Latest
The wellness business

A lobbying industry built on belief and very little science

Wellness is not medicine wearing nicer clothes. It is a distinct business with its own incentives, and the thing it sells most effectively is the feeling that you have done something.

Sample post · 1,200 words · September 2026
▦
Article image
Each post gets one. Stock photography or your own.
▦
Article image
Health tech

What a start-up pitch deck leaves out

Reading a press release the way you read a chart: looking for what is missing.

Sample post · August 2026
▦
Article image
The money

Private equity bought your doctor. Here is what changes.

What happens to a practice when the people holding the money decide what counts as care.

Sample post · August 2026
▦
Article image
Research

What the stem-cell clinics are actually selling

What the guardrails are for, and what gets sold in the gap where they don't reach.

Sample post · July 2026

These four posts are invented, to show what the page looks like with writing in it. Your real first post replaces them.

02The writing

Why I keep writing this.

Medicine is full of claims that sound settled and are not. I spent a career checking them against the data, and this is where I carry on doing it — on the wellness business, on health technology, and on what happens to care when the people holding the money decide what counts.

The novel came out of the same habit of mind. If you want to know how I think before you read it, start here.

Topics

  • The wellness business 4
  • Health tech 3
  • Private equity in medicine 3
  • Research and ethics 2
  • Medical storytelling 2

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New essays, and news about the book.

Contact

Get in touch

Readers, agents, editors, and anyone who wants to argue with me about the wellness industry.

Send a message

This routes your message and helps me answer faster.
This form works on the finished site — messages arrive in your inbox. Nothing is sent from the preview.

Agents and editors

Rebecca's Treatment is a completed medical thriller, currently in developmental edit. Full synopsis and sample pages available on request.

Readers

The newsletter is the best way to hear when the book sells. No schedule, no marketing — just news when there is news.

Elsewhere

LinkedIn is where I am most active.
Medical Editor, Desert Health News.
Board Member, Palm Springs Writers Guild.