REDDEVIL 4

Neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer Leuthardt leans on his medical background in this futuristic debut thriller.

Dr. Hagan Maerici has problems, not the least of which is that his wife can’t seem to understand that, unless he works harder and more efficiently, he’ll soon be cut out of the research he loves: marrying human consciousness and artificial intelligence in a revolutionary way. It’s 2053, and most individuals (except for the very old, technophobes and some religious extremists) are connected by virtue of implants in the brain that make the transmission of information instantaneous and personalized. People can make phone calls, access information and even track one another using these neurological implants. And researchers like Maerici have high hopes that when the breakthrough he's working on comes through, it will yield huge results and profits, since AI will be able to actually think for itself. Then, things start happening that change the playing field: People die, and the deaths are neither explicable nor ordinary. Instead, the over-the-top violent murders are perpetrated by well-known citizens who seemingly have no motive to kill the decedents. When two St. Louis police detectives, old-timer Edwin Krantz and former Navy SEAL Tara Dezner, take on the homicides, they soon find themselves hip-deep in an inexplicable phenomena. It’s apparent from the book’s beginning that Leuthardt knows his subject matter. However, this novel isn’t written on a level that the average science-fiction or medical-thriller reader will appreciate. His language choices often lean toward the esoteric, which makes the tale’s already odd construction even more difficult to follow. Weaving in and out of the various lives of his characters, Leuthardt seems to assume his readers already understand the world he’s created, making his universe overly complicated and technical.

Most of the author’s characters spend a disproportionate hunk of the story in states of confusion, a state that will be shared by many of the novel’s readership.