Let The Patient be your introduction, but be prepared to be hooked. Palmer knows how to thrill and uses his talent to great effect. The bit where the doctor lost control of the microsurgery robot and . . . I won't spoil it for you . . . Later medical details, which are frequent, clearly explain why, for example, a bullet to the left hemisphere is especially bad news for a righthander.
Some points raise queries for the medical reader.
Everyone should be treated equally, especially if someone happens to be holding a gun to your head at the time and has threatened to nuke the city with deadly nerve gas. There is another ethical conundrum. Throughout the book the heroine, a neurosurgical registrar, has to deal with the fear that her boss is not competent at complex surgery. The story never deals with this problem adequately, and you are left considering what the staff should and could have done. Both ethical scenarios are ones that we may come across during our medical careers, although perhaps in less dramatic circumstance.