A Slow Burning

Nat Hennessey, a New York cop, is about to marry Camilla Bissonette when the past catches up with both of them in this complicated thriller by the author of The Fourth Procedure. Nat's father was beaten to death by a black man who never paid for his crime. He believes he has no racial bias against African-Americans, but Cush Walker, a brilliant black scientist who's convinced he's found the neurobiological basis of racism in the human brain, thinks otherwise. Walker has his own haunted past; his father was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the 60s. Now Walker proposes to scan the brains of the NYPD for racial bias, a prospect that alarms Nat and his colleagues. But that's not the only reason for Nat's antipathy toward the scientist; Walker and Camilla were once lovers, and the reason she broke off their affair is somehow related to his experimental procedure. But just as she's about to tell Nat about Cush--and reveal an even murkier secret about the circumstances of her own birth--she's shot by the criminal who killed Nat's father. In laboratory and operating room scenes that will appeal to fans of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton, Cush tries to bring Camilla out of her coma with a risky, potentially fatal, and untested procedure that puts Nat's life in peril too. Slow Burning isn't an easy read, but it's a fascinating one that attempts to combine cutting-edge neuroscience with an explanation for the deep-seated racism that Pottinger believes bedevils everyone. Scientific explanations slow down the pace, and occasionally the characters seem like talking heads instead of complete and complex individuals, but it's the implications of Pottinger's thesis that will disturb the reader and resonate in the mind after the last page is turned. --Jane Adams