A Slow Burning

Twenty years have passed since Nat Hennessy, a street-smart New York detective, saw a thug beat his father to death, yet the memory still burns and his thirst for justice has never faded. When a routine homicide case suddenly offers a chance at vengeance, he takes it, knowing the risk to himself and to the woman he loves is enormous.

Dr. Cush Walker, a pioneering brain surgeon, carries his own childhood memory of watching his father die at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. He has devoted his career to a radical procedure meant to erase the kind of hatred that destroyed his family, though it carries serious dangers for his patients and for himself. Camilla Bisonette, now Nat's fiancée and once romantically connected to Walker, is brought to his clinic near death. Her survival may depend on Walker bending his ethics and medical skill to their limits, and on his uneasy alliance with his bitter rival, Nat.

The novel moves from a buried secret more than fifty years old to the workings of memory inside the human brain, and from the impulses that push people toward violence to the damage they leave behind. Stanley Pottinger builds a relentlessly suspenseful story of deception, murder, love, and science spiraling out of control.