A Poster Child for the Liberal Arts
“You’re literally in the middle of nowhere, in the North Sea, on a rock, with a few people and some reindeer,” she recalls, laughing. “You hope the plane will remember to come back and get you, because it might not actually come when it’s scheduled.”
A “what if?” sense of curiosity has been Gordon’s compass her whole life. It has led her down side trails and through unscheduled adventures to create a life as both a physician and crime novelist.
“Back when I was in my 20s and 30s, I literally never would have guessed I’d be where I am now,” she says.
Gordon grew up in suburban Maryland with parents who worked as civilians for the Navy. (Gordon sprinkles her recollections with references to Leave It to Beaver and the Huxtables.) As an introverted kid with no siblings, she was happiest curled up with a book. Crime novels and spooky movies were her favorites. She liked to make up stories, too; Gordon still has her first book, a school project made out of wallpaper scraps and artwork.
Her parents, both mathematicians, encouraged her writing but regarded it as a hobby, not a future profession. By the time she was 12, Gordon had set her sights on medicine. It was right in line with her love of mystery books.
“Symptoms are like clues, and making a diagnosis is kind of like solving a mystery,” she says. “I was interested in how to use my scientific knowledge to figure out what’s going on with this person sitting in front of me with a cough and a fever.”
She applied to about 20 colleges, but the moment she stepped onto Vassar’s campus, she knew she would attend. “It’s what I had imagined college to be in the books I loved to read.”
Plan B
“The show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was popular, so I initially had it in my head to go be an old-fashioned country family physician with people paying me in chickens,” she recalls.
But she soon realized rural life wasn’t for her. In her last year of residency, one of her attendings was retiring from the Army and told her that the hospital at nearby Fort Jackson was hiring. The Army wasn’t in her long-term plans, but the country doctor idea was off the table and she needed a job. She worked there for six years before moving over to Veterans Affairs.
After six more years, another TV show sparked an itch for a new adventure: Northern Exposure. Three winters of dim, five-hour daylight was enough before Gordon moved to Dallas to become a medical officer with the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command. In 2020, she was selected for the civilian Defense Senior Leader Development Program. That involved earning a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
Today, Gordon is the human survivability lead with the U.S. Army Nuclear and Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Agency (USANCA) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. As civilian Army staff members, she and her team support military personnel behind the front lines. Gordon’s job is to ensure that forces can survive to fight in an environment that has been degraded by a nuclear radiological, biological, or chemical event.
“Human survivability is about taking care of our people, making sure that whatever the incident is, it’s not just the tanks that come through it,” Gordon says. “We do all the coordinating and the analyzing and the information gathering and the resourcing and managing so that the commanders can concentrate on their jobs.”
Writing returns
The book, Murder in G Major—the first in her five-book Gethsemane Brown Mysteries series—was turned into a 2023 Hallmark movie starring Tamera Mowry-Housley. Gordon is in the research stage of a sixth book.
“I actually work on the base where the Blackhawk helicopter [which collided with an American Airlines plane in January] came from. So, you know, real life is random, and bad things happen. And in movies and books, it’s not actually random. I know somebody made it up and sat down and consciously chose the ending.”
History lessons
“As much as we complain about it, America is, at least to me, still a pretty cool place, and everybody had a hand in it, not just the select group of people that we hear about,” says Gordon, who earned a master’s degree in public/applied history from Southern New Hampshire University in 2024. “There’s a whole lot of other people that helped us get to where we are. And I think their stories should be told as well.”
Gordon has found a sense of purpose by staying open to the possibilities at every turning point.
“If I had kept to my plan, I’d be living in some small town somewhere as the doc,” she says. “I realized that it’s okay if Plan A doesn’t pan out, because there’s Plan B, and Plan C, and Plan D.
“And even if the experiences along the way are a little bumpy, they still kind of shape who you are, and there’s always something to learn—even from a bad experience. Even if the only thing you learn is ‘don’t do that again.’”