Flashback - Hardcover

Braver, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765302519 ISBN 13: 9780765302519

Publisher: Forge Books, 2005

Synopsis

If you could relive your childhood, would you? What if you had no choice?

On the thirty-fifth anniversary of his parents' mysterious drowning, Jack Koryan returns to his family beach cottage. During a swim, Jack is attacked by a school of rare jellyfish whose toxic stings put him in a coma for three years.

When he awakens, he finds that the jellyfish toxin has left him with an extraordinary memory that impresses his doctors. This discovery is complicated by flashbacks: some, pleasant childhood vignettes, others, confusing flashes of violence that leave him quaking in horror.

Jack wonders if he's losing his mind, but that fear is dispelled by Rene Ballard, a pharmacologist working on the world's first cure for Alzheimer's Disease. She wants to test Jack because the basis of the drug is the very jellyfish toxin that sent Jack into a coma. And, while several test patients have miraculously regained functionality, others are also experiencing dangerous flashback seizures.

Ballard's revelation sets Jack on a quest to discover what is happening to him. He and Rene uncover a sinister pattern of lies and deceit that has left behind a trail of bodies, and several elderly patients stuck in a past that they cannot emerge from--or don't want to.

About this title

About the Author

Gary Braver is the award-winning author of six critically acclaimed thrillers including Elixir, Gray Matter, and Flashback, which was recipient of the 2006 Massachusetts Honor Book Award for Fiction--a first for a thriller--and which in a starred review Publishers Weekly called “an exceptional medical thriller.” His novels have been translated into five languages, and three have been optioned for movies.

Under his own name, Gary Goshgarian, he is an award-winning professor of English at Northeastern University where he teaches courses in Modern Bestsellers, Science Fiction, Horror Fiction, and Fiction Writing. He has taught fiction-writing workshops through out the United States and Europe for over twenty years. He is the author of five college writing textbooks.

Reviews

Starred Review. So many dreams—it's hard to pick out the right one," reads the epigraph from E.B. White for Braver's exceptional medical thriller, a timely story about how the human brain deals with memory, the current possibilities of developing a drug that cures Alzheimer's disease, and how the search for such a drug leads to greed and murder. On a trip back to Cape Cod on the anniversary of his mother's death by drowning, Jack Koryan, a prep school teacher turned restaurant owner, is stung by a school of rare jellyfish, whose toxins send him into a three-year coma. Haunted by dreams and memories that may or may not be real, Jack wakes to discover that he's of great interest to pharmacologist Rene Ballard, who's testing those same toxins on Alzheimer's victims with extraordinarily successful results—though some have also committed acts of inexplicible violence. A strong plotter, Braver writes clear, clean prose that heightens the suspense. Under his expert guidance, Koryan and Ballard explore a scientific mystery that is touching and believable. With this latest book, Braver (Gray Matter) marks himself as a worthy successor to Robin Cook, Michael Crichton and Tess Gerritsen.
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Rene Ballard is a pharmacologist monitoring the medication of hundreds of nursing-home patients. After a patient suffering from Alzheimer's disease somehow escapes from her residence and kills someone, Rene learns that the woman was part of a group of patients testing a new drug that could be a cure for Alzheimer's. Meanwhile, Jack Koryan, a healthy young man, is in a deep coma after being stung by a rare jellyfish. When other Alzheimer's patients taking the new drug begin displaying frightening delusional side effects, and Jack awakes with unusual powers of memory, Rene suspects this revolutionary cure may not be all it's cracked up to be. At once a fast-paced medical thriller and a thoughtful rumination on the nature of memory (look out, Michael Crichton). David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765302519
• ISBN 13: 9780765302519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400