Tunnel Vision

Synopsis:

What if you didn’t have to die to know that heaven exists?

And what if that knowledge could get you killed?

Following a biking accident on icy Boston streets, grad student Zack Kashian lapses into a coma. When he wakes up on Easter, months later, muttering the Lord’s Prayer in the original Aramaic, the media is set abuzz about the “Miracle Man.” Religious fanatics flock to Zack’s hospital bedside, though he claims to be an atheist.

Zack’s revival also catches the attention of Dr. Elizabeth Luria, who heads up a small team of neuroscientists secretly researching near-death experiences (NDE). Their objective: to determine if there is anything to the claims of NDE victims about floating down tunnels into the celestial light and meeting spiritual beings. Is all that evidence of the afterlife? Or is it just neurobiology, as Sarah Wyman, one of Luria’s young researchers suspects.

For personal reasons, Luria is desperate to prove the afterlife exists. So are her wealthy, evangelist backers, who can’t wait to announce the greatest discovery in human history: that God exists. A discovery that would at last reconcile science and religion. A discovery that would end the world’s religious strife and unite all humanity.

Yet Zack’s experiences are anything but heavenly. While he and Sarah struggle to understand his horrific out-of-body experiences, they have no idea that sinister forces have taken an interest in them. Forces to whom near-death experiences are utter blasphemy—deceptions by Satan himself. They enlist a menacing agent who, in the name of God, will stop at nothing to terminate the project and all involved.

Publishers Weekly:

Graduate student Zack Kashion, the hero of Braver's entertaining medical thriller, is trying to finish his dissertation at Northeastern University, but he keeps getting sidetracked by his gambling habit and resulting debts. Then he hits his head in a bad bike accident on a Boston street. On awaking in the hospital from a 12-week coma, atheist Zack finds he has become an object of intense interest by religious fanatics after being secretly filmed muttering in ancient Aramaic, a language he doesn't know. After leaving the hospital, he signs up as a paid volunteer for a private scientific study that's putting subjects into near-death comas and recording their brainwaves for activity in an attempt to prove that there is indeed life after death. To complicate matters, a paid assassin is killing scientists involved in the experiment. A surfeit of religious discussion may put off some readers, but in general Braver (Skin Deep) shows himself an adept practitioner of this subgenre. (June)

Biography:

GARY BRAVER is the bestselling author of Elixir, Gray Matter, Flashback, and Skin Deep. Flashback is the only thriller to have won the prestigious Massachusetts Book Award. He lives with his family in Arlington, Massachusetts.