Lois Duncan, a prolific author of YA suspense novels "who also chronicled her decades-long inquiry into the unsolved homicide of her own daughter," died June 15, the Associated Press reported. She was 82.
Duncan wrote more than 50 books, including Who Killed My Daughter?, Killing Mr. Griffin, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Don't Look Behind You, Stranger with My Face, Locked in Time, Summer of Fear and A Gift for Magic. Among her honors were the 2015 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award for a "body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality"; and the 1992 Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her contribution in writing for teens.
Lizzie Skurnick, who has re-released some of Duncan's early work through her imprint Lizzie Skurnick Books, told NPR: "You have girls switching bodies with each other, and you have girls at a boarding school being possessed by long-dead artists. It's these dramatic situations, but the writing is as good as any literary fiction today."
Judy Blume tweeted: "I am so very sad to learn of Lois Duncan's death. We lived in New Mexico at the same time and were writer-buddies."
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Richard Selzer, "a surgeon who turned his operating-room experiences into fictional stories that blended the gore, the beauty and the absurdity of modern medicine," died June 15, the New York Times reported. He was 87. Selzer's "old-fashioned style infused short stories, essays and memoir. His 1991 New York Times Magazine piece, 'A Question of Mercy,' about an AIDS patient requesting assisted suicide, inspired a play of the same title by David Rabe."
Selzer's books include The Doctor Stories, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, Confessions of a Knife, Rituals of Surgery and Letters to a Young Doctor.
Jerome Groopman, a Harvard professor of medicine and staff writer for the New Yorker, once wrote that Selzer "helped usher in the genre of medical writing in which the physician puts his experiences under the microscope for the lay reader's scrutiny."