A compelling if occasionally sedate thriller.
In this installment of Lee’s Dr. Mark Lin Medical Thrillers series, the intrepid physician vies with a mysterious computer hacker.
As the story begins, Southern California-based, board-certified internist Dr. Mark Lin arrives for his usual shift at Anaheim’s Ivory Memorial Hospital. Lin is a hospitalist—a doctor who exclusively practices inpatient care—and he’s world-weary about the slow churn of neglectful patients he’s always dealing with (“Sometimes, that’s what my job comes down to: wiping away physical sickness within the morally sick,” he grouses. “Prolonging people’s lives just so they could go back to being a nuisance, a troublemaker, a menace to society”). Though his job can be tedious, Lin is at least grateful that the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has passed. He and his colleagues are startled by the announcement that in-house company emails are off-limits while the hospital deals with an attack of malware. The offending program, “Lucifer’s Worm,” is crippling computer systems worldwide in a kind of “cyber pandemic” that breaches Ivory Memorial and makes Dr. Lin’s life a nightmare. Patient names and medication orders are switched and falsified as the hacker, nicknamed Doctor Lucifer, fine-tunes his attacks. The hospital’s tech support is outclassed (“the hacker has multiple ways to evade us,” they tell Dr. Lin. “We’re playing digital whack-a-mole”), and the real-world consequences soon involve Dr. Lin in violence as he battles both his own disillusionment (“Patients used to trust doctors,” he complains. “Not anymore. Now they look up medical stuff on the internet, like they want to trap us in a gotcha moment”) and his growing suspicions of one particular colleague.
Lee knowledgeably and very effectively builds up the background tension of his novel, which stems from the frightening extent to which the mechanisms of health care—including medical records, medication orders, and treatment protocols—have become digitized and therefore vulnerable to the kind of cyber-attacks carried out by Doctor Lucifer. Dr. Lin is a dour but involving protagonist; Lee makes him more than sufficiently flawed to elicit readers’ empathy. The specter of Covid-19 (both the stress of the pandemic itself and the lingering bitterness some characters still feel over the government’s management of stimulus checks) is an intriguing element that makes an unexpected return in the narrative as the crisis’ long-term effects on Lin become more and more obvious. (“Covid-19 had kept everyone on their toes, turning healthcare workers like me into mindless drones,” he thinks. “The whole time, I never bothered to deprogram and destress.”) Lin’s eventual centrality to the plot is a bit unlikely, and the book’s pacing is often too sluggish for a narrative with the trappings of a medical thriller. Still, the drama of Lin’s personal redemption is unfailingly involving. “Redemption can occur even with the worst people,” he’s told at one point without believing it. But as the tempo of the story increases, he comes closer and closer to thinking that “perhaps there is such a thing as treatment for disease of humanity.”
A compelling if occasionally sedate thriller.Pub Date: May 24, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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