"This fast-paced, smart, witty, and tautly written thriller explodes with an international setting and a great cast of characters including the unlikely hero-a young university bovine virus researcher in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author gives us high stakes with incredible details, creating an authentic and fascinating look inside university labs and politics as well as a jihadist plot that takes our hero around the globe to Cairo and back. Gary Jones is a great new voice on the thriller novel scene. A Jerk, A Jihad and a Virus is a highly recommended read."

-Christine DeSmet, mystery author and screenwriter, Master Class writing instructor, University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies

Gary Jones was raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and grew up showing Holsteins and Clydesdales. Jones earned his veterinary degree at Michigan State University and practiced bovine medicine in rural Wisconsin for nineteen years. At the age of 42, Jones uprooted his family and returned to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a PhD in microbiology. While at the U of M, Jones developed both a diagnostic test for a disease of swine, and a means of extracting bacterial DNA from swine feces and used the test he’d developed, which was based on PCR, to identify pigs infected with a bacterium that had not been able to grow in the lab. The diagnostic test is now a standard test used worldwide in veterinary diagnostic labs. Jones is also the author of Doc’s Codicil, a finalist for the INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for 2015.