Ransoming Hector

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent medical thriller!
Review: What if all crime is due to brain damage? Not as far-fetched a question as it sounds. There's a lot of good evidence coming out that criminals--especially violent criminals--suffer from real, identifiable brain damage. Dr. Dean takes this premise and weaves an interesting, suspenseful thriller from it. Set sometime in the near future, 'Ransoming Hector' is about a psychologist who comes up with a treatment for the type of brain damage violent criminals have. Her 'cure' is a drug which helps regrow brain cells. (This, also, is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Scientists are very close to developing exactly this kind of thing.) But there are a couple of problems with the drug. First, it can cause seizures. Second, nobody wants it to succeed. Why? Because punishing crime is big business. Martha Tisseau (the protagonist) runs into a buzzsaw of a conspiracy after she develops her drug: from the people who run the prisons to the politicians who run on 'tough on crime' platforms to the entire Justice Department. Nobody, it seems, wants violent crime to go away. It's too profitable. But the powers-that-be let Martha try out her drug anyway and then allow the criminal in question to escape on purpose, to prove a point. They want the public to think that the drug makes the criminal smarter, not healthier, and they want all research on the topic stopped, but they don't want to come across as the bad guys. It sounds complicated, but Dr. Dean--who obviously knows his stuff!--makes it all clear. It's well-written, smart, and suspenseful. A perfect beach companion!