Oh, Michael Palmer. My best friend introduced me to this author in sixth grade, and we loved him. I devoured her whole collection of his books, medical thrillers that usually featured at least one dirty scene. I still have a copy of my favorite, Flashback, in which I earmarked the dirty scene so Cat could read it in the lunch-line. Beyond that one page of kissing and occasional nipples, we loved these books for the medicine and plotting. Palmer wrote The Second Opinion in 2009, and while I haven’t read one of his books in a decade, I’m so happy to see he still had that touch before his sudden passing in 2013.
Dr. Thea Sperelakis comes from a family of genius doctors, starting with the father: Petros Sperelakis, internal medicine specialist at Boston’s famous Beaumont Clinic. Thea became a doctor, too, but chose to work in Africa as a part of Doctors Without Borders — in part because her father’s attitude towards her Asperger’s syndrome. When Petros gets struck by a car one night and ends up in a coma, Thea comes home and –dun dun dun! — discovers that it may not have been an accident (spoiler alert: totally not an accident).
I loved the medicine and the intrigue, and I also loved Thea. Writing a character with Asperger’s syndrome can be dangerous for an author — too easy to fall into stereo-typing or caricature. But like the fantastic Mark Haddon, Michael Palmer had personal knowledge about the autistic spectrum — his son has Asperger’s. Palmer mentions in the acknowledgments how he based some of Thea’s behaviors on interactions with his son and I, at least, thought she rang very true. It’s such a shame that Palmer won’t have a chance to write another book starring such a smart, direct character.