Josh Bazell has a BA in writing from Brown University and a MD from Columbia University. He is currently a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and is working on his second novel. He wrote "Beat the Reaper" during the end of medical school and the beginning of residency. Some of his favorite writers are James Ellroy, Ken Bruen, Michael Connelly and Peter Lovesey. He states that he got the idea for this novel when going through medical school training and observed the tension physicians feel between doing medicine and their life outside of medicine. So he wanted to write about a doctor who was also the opposite of a doctor.