While speaking at a Hong Kong medical conference, neurosurgeon Dr. Lucas McCrae slips the cloth off a cadaver’s head during a routine medical demonstration, and is overwhelmed with the shock by what’s staring back at him: His best friend, Andy Baer.
Stunned, McCrae races back to Seattle to discover that Andy is in fact missing and may have been murdered by a gang of body snatchers who operate a legit funeral business and make a fortune by selling recovered body parts to medical researchers.
McCrae teams up with an unlikely pair—a beautiful but hardnosed female cop and a gang member whose family was victimized by the body parts ring—to try and expose a macabre web of corruption that involves law enforcement, politicians, funeral home curators and murdered prostitutes.
Review:
After reading Allen Wyler's previous novel, Dead End Deal, I was excited to sample another thriller fit for the big-screen - Dead Ringer - and I was not disappointed! Wyler's ability to capture the reader's attention with the first sentence and hold it until the last is remarkable. I almost did not want to put the book down for trivial things - like sleeping or eating - because I might have lost out on the tension that had been building up. The characters and plot-line were well-developed and expertly crafted; even though I figured out most of the twists before they occurred, I was never bored or annoyed by where the plot was going. I enjoyed reading about Lucas and Wendy's search for proof against DSH, as well as their opposing personalities; I just wish that there had been a sort of comic/ romance aspect between them to cut through some of the intensity and expose some of their emotions. I found the points-of-view and flashbacks interesting, although odd, but I felt that they added some extra depth. I also liked the believable quality of the dialogue and the medical jargon - not too technical for most readers. Overall, I found Dead Ringer to be a unique and well-written medical thriller that held enough suspense to keep me eagerly entertained. Recommended for adult readers seeking a medical thriller/ mystery full of shocks, chills, and assorted body parts.
Rating: On the Run (4/5)
*** I received this book from the author (Astor + Blue Editions) in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
Allen Wyler is a renowned neurosurgeon who earned an international reputation for pioneering surgical techniques to record brain activity. He has served on the faculties of both the University of Washington and the University of Tennessee, and in 1992 was recruited by the prestigious Swedish Medical Center to develop a neuroscience institute. In 2002, he left active practice to become medical director for a startup med-tech company (that went public in 2006) and he now chairs the Institutional Review Board of a major medical center in the Pacific Northwest. Leveraging a love for thrillers since the early 1970s, Wyler devoted himself to fiction writing in earnest, eventually serving as vice president of the International Thriller Writers organization for several years. After publishing his first two medical thrillers Deadly Errors (2005) and Dead Head (2007), he officially retired from medicine to devote himself to writing full time.
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