Mind Catcher » (Unabridged)

John Darnton has worked for forty years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories that were smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law. He is a best-selling author whose previous novels include Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy. He lives in New York.

New York City: A thirteen-year-old boy named Tyler lies in a hospital, his brain damaged in a tragic accident. By his bedside, his father stands helplessly, as two very different scientists take charge of the boy's fate. One is a neurosurgeon, whose unorthodox experiments use computers to control a patient's physical responses during surgery. The other is a researcher with experiments of his own, ones so secret he can reveal them to no one: his attempts to find the spark of human consciousness...and capture it forever.

Together, they will produce a result beyond anything they could have conceived, sending Tyler far beyond the frontiers of medical science into an astonishing netherworld of man and machine - a place no living person has gone before and from which one desperate person will try to bring him back....

Chicago Tribune

...a medical sci-fi thriller that...hurtles along, hightailing it nimbly around every sharp corner of technical knowledge and scientific research.