More Likely Than Not follows a grieving father imprisoned for his son’s death and the forensic investigator who risks her career to expose the bias, institutional pride, and buried evidence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I have spent much of my career in medicine, both as a surgeon and as a medico-legal expert, and one thing has always fascinated me: medicine is practiced by human beings. We rely on science and evidence, but we interpret that evidence through our own experiences, assumptions, and biases.

That became the seed for More Likely Than Not.

I also love mixing real events into my fiction. I think it gives a thriller a different kind of tension when the reader realizes that, although the characters and the story are fictional, some of what they are reading has actually happened.

There have been real cases in which forensic medical evidence was accepted as authoritative, only to be seriously questioned years later, after people had already been convicted and lives had been changed. Those cases fascinated me. I started asking myself: What if a highly respected physician reaches the wrong conclusion, not because he is incompetent or malicious, but because he genuinely believes he is right?

Then I wanted to follow that conclusion beyond the autopsy room. Once a medical opinion enters the justice system, it can influence investigators, lawyers, judges, families, and ultimately the life of an accused person.

That became Mario’s story.

And then I needed someone willing to go back and question what everyone else had already accepted as the truth. That became Amélie.

That is something I really enjoy doing as a writer: taking pieces of the real world and weaving them into fiction until the reader starts wondering, “Could this actually happen?”

How did you balance forensic accuracy with the pace and emotional intensity of a thriller?

I had to remind myself occasionally that I was writing a thriller and not a medical paper!

The medicine had to be accurate. That was important to me. But readers do not need a lecture on forensic pathology. They need enough information to understand why something matters.

So I kept coming back to a simple question: Does the reader actually need to know this?

If a medical detail changes what Amélie thinks, creates doubt about Gabriel’s death, or raises the stakes for Mario, then it belongs in the story. If it is there simply because I find it medically interesting, it probably does not.

Ultimately, the medicine is not what makes the story emotional. The consequences are.

A finding on an autopsy report is one thing. Realizing that the finding may have helped send an innocent father to prison for fifteen years is something very different.

What interested you most about exploring bias through Dr. Lemaire, a skilled professional who sincerely believes he is being objective?

That is exactly what interested me about Lemaire.

I did not want him to be the bad guy.

It would have been much easier to write him as an arrogant or incompetent doctor who makes a terrible mistake. But I think that would also make the story much less interesting.

Lemaire is good at what he does. He is experienced. He cares about his work. He believes in science. And most importantly, he genuinely believes he is being objective.

And he can still be wrong.

That is something I find fascinating about expertise. The more experience we have, the more confident we naturally become in our judgment. Most of the time that experience makes us better at what we do. But it can also make it harder to recognize when our own assumptions are influencing us.

Lemaire never sets out to destroy Mario’s life. He reaches a conclusion that makes sense to him, and once he believes that conclusion, other pieces of the case begin to fit around it.

To me, that is much more interesting, and much more unsettling, than a villain deliberately falsifying evidence.

What do you hope readers understand about accountability and the lasting damage caused by overturned convictions?

That you cannot give someone those years back.

We sometimes talk about overturning a wrongful conviction as though justice has finally been restored. In one sense, of course it has. But what does that really mean to someone who has spent years in prison for something they did not do?

Their relationships have changed. Their children have grown up. Their reputation may be destroyed. They have lost years of their life. Walking out of prison does not suddenly erase any of that.

That was something I thought about a lot while writing Mario.

But I also did not want the book to suggest that accountability simply means finding someone else to blame. Sometimes terrible outcomes happen because several people make decisions that seem perfectly reasonable at the time.

For me, the more interesting question is whether we are willing to reconsider those decisions when new evidence appears.

And that becomes particularly interesting with AI in the novel. Technology can help us see patterns that human beings have missed. But it cannot take responsibility for what we decide to do with them.

If readers finish More Likely Than Not just a little less comfortable with certainty, I think I will have accomplished what I wanted.

Because in medicine, and certainly in justice, being wrong can change someone else’s life forever.

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