Dead Ringer
| Dead Ringer | |
| Allen Wyler | |
| Astor + Blue Editions (2011) | |
| Rating: | ★★★☆☆ |
| Tags: | Suspense, Fiction, Thrillers, Dead Ringer |
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.
Internationally renowned neurosurgeon Allen Wyler takes us deep into a nightmarish scenario, shockingly ripped from recent headlines, and delivers a horrifically plausible, page-turning thriller.
"In the tradition of Robin Cook, Wyler takes us behind the scenes to show us things the medical establishment doesn’t want us to see.
DEAD RINGER
builds a high-speed plot on a startling but all-too-plausible premise. This is the stuff nightmares are made of." --
Joseph Finder,
New York Times
bestselling author of *Paranoia and Buried Secrets
*
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.
Praise for Allen Wyler’s Thrillers
“
DEAD END DEAL
is a medical thriller of the highest order, reviving the genre with a splendid mixture of innovation and cutting-edge timeliness. Neurosurgeon Allen Wyler knows of what he writes, and the result is a thriller that equals and updates the best of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton. His latest is terrifying, riveting, and a masterpiece of science and suspense.”
—Jon Land, best-selling author of
STRONG AT THE BREAK
“
DEAD END DEAL
by Allen Wyler is a masterful medical thriller, intelligent, ferociously paced, scary as hell, ripping with suspense, and filled with fascinating (and horrific) details that only a neurosurgeon-turned-writer like Wyler could provide. If you like the medical thrillers of Robin Cook or Michael Crichton, you will absolutely love
DEAD END DEAL
.”
—Douglas Preston, author of
THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE
and co-creator of the
PENDERGAST NOVELS
“The gritty, graphic details of cutting-edge surgical procedures, capped with an exciting conclusion, should keep fans of the genre riveted.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“With its lightning-paced excitement and fascinating science,
DEAD HEAD
has everything you could hope for in a medical thriller!”
—Tess Gerritsen, author of
THE MEPHISTO CLUB
“In the tradition of Robin Cook, Wyler takes us behind the scenes to show us things the medical establishment doesn’t want us to see.
DEAD RINGER
builds a high-speed plot on a startling but all-too-plausible premise. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.”
—Joseph Finder, New York Times Bestselling Author of
PARANOIA
and
BURIED SECRETS
“The suspense builds and builds in this riveting pageturner. It’s a skillful merging of the medical thriller and political thriller … Tom Clancy meets Tess Gerritsen!”
—Kevin O’Brien, New York Times Bestselling Author of
THE LAST VICTIM
and
KILLING SPREE
“You’ll be asking the nurse to swab your forehead when you’re admitted into this tense medical thriller exposing
DEADLY ERRORS
. Wyler does for hospitals what Benchley did for the ocean.”
—Joe Moore, co-author of the international best seller
THE GRAIL CONSPIRACY
“Wyler writes a fast-paced thriller, which reawakens your scariest misgivings about the Medical-Industrial Complex and the profit motive corrupting the art of healing.”
—Darryl Ponicsan, author of
THE LAST DETAIL
“
DEADLY ERRORS
has a fascinating and frightening premise that gives it the potential to be a best seller in the Robin Cook mold.”
—William Dietrich, author of
HADRIAN’S WALL
“This is an ‘up all night’ pass into troubled places that only hardworking doctors know about; a turbulent world of trusting patients and imperfect humans struggling with the required image of perfection. Only a gifted surgeon like Allen Wyler could craft such a wild and wonderful best-of-the-breed medical thriller!”
—John J. Nance, author of
PANDORA’S CLOCK
and
FIRE FLIGHT
“Wyler’s debut novel is both an engrossing thriller and a cautionary tale of the all-too-frequent intersection of high technology and higher greed. It’s a message all of us better pay attention to, or face the consequences.”
—Mark Olshaker, author of
EINSTEIN’S BRAIN, UNNATURAL CAUSES,
and
THE EDGE;
co-author of
MINDHUNTER, JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS
Ringer
A novel by
A
LLEN
W
YLER
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
DEAD RINGER
Astor + Blue Editions LLC
Copyright © 2012 by Allen Wyler
All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:
Astor + Blue Editions, LLC
New York, NY 10003
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Wyler, Allen. DEAD RINGER—1st ed.
ISBN: 978-1-938231-14-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-12-4 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-13-1 (epdf )
1. Neurosurgeon Doctor—Thriller—Fiction 2. Body Snatchers—Fiction 3. Corrupt Cops—Fiction 4. Serial Killer—Fiction 5. Harvesting Cadavers for Profit—Fiction 6. Seattle (Wash), Hong Kong (China)—Fiction 7. Doctor-Female Detective–American Love story I. Title
Book Design: Bookmasters
Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano
To Leslie
H
ONG
K
ONG
A
DARK, ILL-FORMED
premonition punched Lucas McRae in the gut so hard it stole his breath. He froze, aware of something drastically wrong involving someone close to him.
Laura? Josh? Were they safe?
A second later it vanished, leaving only a lingering vague sense of foreboding.
He’d heard of stories like this—a mother suddenly awakened, knowing her son was just killed by an insurgent’s RPG half a world away. He rejected these tales as nothing more than folklore. Mental telepathy—or whatever you wanted to call it—was scientifically impossible. But, Jesus, this thing, this awful feeling in his gut …
“Dr. McRae, over here!”
Lucas looked toward the voice. To his right, over the roof of a taxi and beyond the hotel loading zone, Jimmy Wong waved from the rolled-down window of a red compact. A Toyota or Nissan, but a model that isn’t available in the States. Thankful for the distraction, Lucas trotted over to the car. But the freefloating, ill-defined dread returned, burrowing in his gut.
He slid into the passenger seat, his skin already sticky from the thick tropical humidity and sinus-clogging smog. He buckled in and shut the door.
Wong Yiw-Wah, or Jimmy to Westerners, extended a hand. “Welcome to Hong Kong.” The president of the Hong Kong Neurosurgical Society had a friendly, oval face of indeterminable age. Wong’s temples had turned to gray, like Lucas’s.
Lucas shook hands and said, “Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.”
Wong merged into morning rush hour traffic and accelerated. “Sorry our group cannot afford The Peninsula. Your hotel accommodations are adequate?” He spoke with a slight British accent. Lucas figured he’d probably been schooled in England.
“Yes, very nice. Thank you.”
The Harbor View International Hotel was an okay, no frills, three-star place to sleep at night and shave in the morning. With spending the day at the meeting, a fancier place would’ve been a waste of money. It could be quieter, though. A rattling elevator door across from his room woke him repeatedly throughout the night.
“And your flight over?”
“Perfect.” That was one of those white lies you tell a host.
“Sorry I was unable to meet you at the airport, but the operating theater became frightfully backed up and my case dragged on and on. Certainly, I don’t have to tell
you
how those things go.” Wong glanced over his shoulder, preparing to change lanes. “The car picked you up without a problem, I am told. True?”
“It did. Thanks.”
Lucas had rolled in about eight last evening. He was dog tired, coated with a layer of stale sweat, and had eyelids that felt lined with sand. He didn’t bother with dinner, just showered and then poured a minibar scotch to use as an Ambien chaser before
hitting the sheets. The combination worked like a sledgehammer to his brain, putting him out within minutes. Otherwise, with the change in time zones, he would have been wide awake until just before time to get up again. Business trips. He hated the fatigue jet lag caused. Especially when you were expected to socialize at cocktail parties and dinners.
“Very good, then.” Jimmy cleared his throat. “I hope you are up to demonstrating your skills today. Your audience will be keen to see you work.”
Lucas nodded, but his mind returned to the god-awful premonition from moments ago. What was that all about? He tried to distract himself by watching the city’s buildings fly by as Jimmy Wong sped down West Kowloon Highway. Hong Kong: a vertical city of breath-stealing Western architecture built to ancient feng shui standards. But hard as he tried, he couldn’t shake it. Something bad had happened. What?