Flashback » (Reprint)

Gary Braver is the bestselling 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.

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.

Publishers Weekly

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. Agent, Susan Crawford. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.