Blog Archives
Unseen Adversaries
Fade to Blue follows an Alzheimer’s researcher who is being hunted and manipulated after accidentally creating a drug that can almost instantly wipe out all brain activity. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
In 1998, I was working at a steel mill. One evening during a break, a coworker suggested we write a short story together. While considering ideas, I remembered that an annealing line had crashed because a computer controlling its speed and torque had lost all Random-access memory. I said, “How about this: a scientist creates a drug that can erase a human’s memory.”
How much research went into the neuroscience and Alzheimer’s elements of the story?
My father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease when I began writing Fade to Blue. That had a huge impact on me and the story.
Regarding the research, neuroscientist Dr. Brian Cummings invited me to his UC Irvine laboratory, where I saw firsthand the experiments and brain research being done by his students. The Memory Research Institute depicted in Fade to Blue is the result of my visit to UC Irvine. And it was Dr. Cummings who explained how a brain-destroying drug like T-3 could be created.
I later went to New York City at the invitation of Dr. Bernardo Rudy, head of the Rudy Lab at NYU Department of Neuroscience, to get a tour of his laboratory and discuss the science in my book.
The novel builds tension through small, everyday moments—driving, showering, simply being alone. Why was it important to show fear in those ordinary situations?
I wanted to infuse fear into normally mundane aspects of Sarah’s life so a reader could identify. We all drive a car and receive phone calls from friends. Those events shouldn’t stoke fear or panic. They do in Fade to Blue because unknown and unseen adversaries are following Sarah’s every move and listening to her every sound. This fear is omnipresent, but she must maintain a happy façade and keep her friends in the dark. At the same time, she channels her fear into courage, cunning, and resolve.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Unfortunately, I’m not planning to write more books at this time. It took me 25 years to write Fade to Blue.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Sarah Brenalen, a frustrated researcher, secretly tests experimental Alzheimer’s drugs, only to create a brain-destroying compound. Marcel, an international operative, sees its potential.
Fade to Blue plunges you into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game. Is Sarah a pawn, or can she outwit Marcel and prevent global catastrophe?
Uncover a dark conspiracy
Experience a fast-paced thriller
Explore the ethics of scientific discovery
For fans of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton, this medical thriller blends cutting-edge science with heart-stopping suspense.
Fade to Blue
In Fade to Blue, author Hank Scheer delivers a story that begins with a scientific trespass and spirals into international coercion. Sarah Brenalen, an exhausted Alzheimer’s researcher at the Memory Research Institute, secretly tests an outlaw idea, accidentally creates T-3, a drug that can wipe out nearly all brain activity in moments, and then finds herself hunted, monitored, and manipulated by a highly organized crew that wants the formula, the sample, and eventually her life. The book opens with Sarah being cornered on a California beach by Marcel, a courtly and sinister operative, then backtracks to show how her desperation to do something meaningful about Alzheimer’s set the whole mechanism in motion.
What I liked most is that the novel understands panic as something granular. Scheer does not merely tell me Sarah is scared; he gives her a humiliating, intimate form of surveillance and lets the dread creep into ordinary acts, driving home, showering, smoking again, trying to think clearly while someone may be listening to her breathe. The early chapters also give Sarah a real civilian life, with her music, her overwork, her boyfriend Rogelio, and her stubborn hope of doing useful science, so the thriller machinery has something human to grind against. That matters. Without that ballast, T-3 would just be a nifty premise. With it, the book has moral friction: ambition curdles into guilt, and guilt becomes a trap.
The prose is clear and propulsive, and that serves the story well. The novel’s sheer narrative commitment kept me turning pages. Once Sarah’s ordeal widens from Bay Area laboratories and freeway gambits to Paris, false deaths, and tactical reversals, the book develops a pulpy momentum that I found hard to resist. I especially appreciated that Sarah is neither saint nor fool; she is culpable, intelligent, frightened, improvisational, and sometimes magnificently stubborn. That blend gives the novel its voltage. Marcel, meanwhile, is the kind of polished monster thrillers need: controlled, fastidious, and all the more venomous for seeming civilized. By the ending, with Sarah alive in Paris and preparing to tell Rogelio the full story of T-3, I felt the book had earned its final note of battered continuation rather than neat closure.
I’d recommend Fade to Blue to readers of techno-thriller, medical thriller, science-fiction thriller, and suspense fiction who like high-concept danger tethered to an ethical mess rather than abstract spectacle. Fans of Michael Crichton will recognize the pleasure of a scientific idea turning predatory, though Scheer’s book feels more intimate and less clinically detached, with a stronger emphasis on surveillance, coercion, and personal fallout. This is a book for readers who want momentum, menace, and just enough laboratory plausibility to make the nightmare feel uncomfortably near. Fade to Blue proves that one bad experiment can cast a very long shadow.
Pages: 283 | ASIN : B0BS4DXMFJ
