Mind Catcher

Chicago Tribune

...a medical sci-fi thriller that...hurtles along, hightailing it nimbly around every sharp corner of technical knowledge and scientific research.

The New York Times

...Mind Catcher gets pretty hard to put down.

Publishers Weekly

At Manhattan's renowned St. Catherine's Hospital, brilliant neurosurgeon Leopoldo Saramaggio does pioneering research on healing the damaged brain by linking it to computers that can take over its functions temporarily. Unbeknownst to the imperious Saramaggio, colleague Dr. Warren Cleaver, a fame-hungry mad scientist in the Hollywood tradition, carries out illegal experiments with mentally ill patients at run-down Pinegrove Hospital on Roosevelt Island. Cleaver's experiments take Saramaggio's work to dangerous extremes. Thirteen-year-old Tyler Jessup is rushed to St. Catherine's after a piece of rock-climbing equipment gets lodged in his head. His distraught father, Scott, a famous photographer and single parent, agrees to let Saramaggio try his new technique on Tyler, convinced that it's his son's only chance. Second thoughts quickly follow and, assisted by beautiful Dr. Kate Willet, new on the staff at St. Catherine's, Scott battles to get his initial consent reversed. The story sags as Scott and Kate grow closer, a development dictated more by literary convention than logic or character chemistry, but it quickens again when Tyler's bodily functions fail and evil Cleaver whisks him away for his Frankenstein experiments. Darnton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Neanderthal and The Experiment, writes elegantly, but maroons the novel in no-man's-land: too short on action and suspense to fully succeed as a thriller, it lacks the character depth to convince as serious fiction. New York City author appearances. (Aug. 5) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

If computers could register all brain electrical impulses, couldn't they then keep a body alive even if the brain had "died"? Could one then isolate the very essence of the mind, the anima, the soul? When 13-year-old Tyler Jessup suffers profound brain injury, two neurosurgeons see conflicting opportunities. One wants to replace damaged brain cells with regenerated ones, the other wants to use a machine to separate the mind from its physical surroundings. Tyler's father, desperate to rescue his son, ultimately subjects himself to the latter experiment in order to find his son's psyche and bring it back. Darnton, a veteran New York Times editor, skillfully pushes current science just a bit further in his third novel and for the most part makes the what-if plausible. As he did in The Experiment with cloning humans on demand, he makes the science accessible but not intrusive while adding sometimes lurid plot twists. The suspense is largely psychological and emotional though no less frightening in its moral and religious implications. For all public and academic library fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/02.]-Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A comatose young boy's mind is the prize in a tug of war between his father and a group of scientists with serious God complexes. Since the other characters introduced in the beginning here are a brilliant, arrogant, and innovative neurosurgeon and a psychologist intent on probing the limits of the human mind, it's a sure thing that the 13-year-old boy going mountain-climbing won't come to a good end. And indeed he doesn't when a piece of climbing equipment is dropped from a height and imbedded into his skull. The boy, Tyler, is whisked off to a Manhattan hospital where Saramaggio, the neurosurgeon, has been called in to perform a medical miracle. Tyler's father, Scott, is given a tough choice. Saramaggio and Cleaver, a psychologist who holds court in a decrepit old asylum on Roosevelt Island, have been secretly working on a procedure by which severely brain-damaged patients are hooked up to a bank of computers that basically record and store the patient's brain's vitals while the body undergoes a brief death. The bereaved Scott not surprisingly agrees to the surgery, and the long process begins. But all isn't so right with Saramaggio and Cleaver's invention, something that becomes obvious when we see Cleaver meeting up with some cyber creeps, and also performing not-so-voluntary experiments on his more disturbed patients. Scott enlists Kate, one of the new surgeons at Saramaggio's hospital, to get his apparently brain-dead son out of the devilish apparatus that appears designed only to replicate his son's personality in digital form. Darnton (The Experiment, 1999, etc.) has a style that veers disconcertingly between affecting drama and camp-Cleaver's gothic asylum being one daunting example. Initially exciting-a melding of Robin Cook with one of William Gibson's lesser efforts-the story is eventually wearying. Solid but uneven: brings to mind too many other, more exceptional, books.