When you come across a thriller that feels all too possible, you can’t help but get pulled in—and Deadly Odds 8.0 does exactly that. It imagines a threat most of us never consider: that the very technology designed to save our lives might one day be used to end them.
Deadly Odds 8.0
by Allen Wyler
After a sudden death outside a Seattle church, the CEO of a cardiac device company receives a terrifying call from a disguised voice. The message is simple and brutal: shut down your business, or more people will die. The attacker has found a way to exploit vulnerabilities in AI-powered pacemakers. Arnold Gold and his cyber investigation team, who once vowed to take no new clients, can’t turn away from this case. As victims mount and the FBI scrambles, the group must use every ounce of their technical skill and intuition to stop a killer hiding behind layers of encryption.
Allen Wyler, a retired neurosurgeon and two-time Thriller Award nominee, brings real-world medical and ethical stakes to every page. Learn more about his books at allenwyler.com.
Amazon: https://bit.ly/3I7jwcz
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237133734-deadly-odds-8-0
Guest Post
I’m often asked why, as a retired surgeon, I write about hacking. Great question with a complicated answer. So here goes: In 1989 I read the book, Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage. At the time, the author, Clifford Stoll, was managing the computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; machines that were loaded with classified material. This true story fascinated me so much that I wanted to write thrillers about hacking, but my literary agent told me that the subject would never work, that I needed to write medical thrillers instead since medicine was my credential. Which I did. After publishing several, I wanted to change my subject matter to something radically different, so I switched publishers and wrote Changes, a story about the universal fantasy of being able to live one’s life over with one’s present fund of knowledge. Would we really do things differently and actually change our way of living, or would we be held hostage to our fundamental personality?
Breaking away from my designated genre was so satisfying that I then wrote Deadly Odds; a story about a young computer savant who idolizes Nate Silver, a statistician who uses readily available data to accurately predict the outcome of political races. In this case, my protagonist builds an artificial intelligence system that can pick winners of football and basketball games. Sort of like being in possession of the goose that lays golden eggs. His system is so successful that he supports himself with his winnings. But, you guessed it, professional gambling involves some pretty unsavory characters so when the wrong people take notice of this kid raking in the coin, it raises their eyebrows.
My agent loved it! He suggested I turn the character, Arnold Gold, and his AI system into a series. Voila, the Deadly Odds series was born. By the 8th installment, Arnold has built a small company of white-hat hackers who’ve developed a successful business providing discrete concierge IT services to Seattle law firms too small to have their own IT staff or aren’t particularly keen on having just anyone from on outside source, such as The Geek Squad, have unrestricted access to computers loaded with confidential client information. Each series installment carries forth the same characters with all their personal baggage, but the stories themselves are self-contained, and can be read out of sequence without any loss of impact.
The present installment circles back to my medical thriller heritage with a hacker twist: On a Sunday morning, an unsuspecting parishioner collapses on the steps of a church.
Moments later the CEO of a cardiac pacemaker company receives a phone call from an electronically distorted voice demanding that they shutter their business by the end of the week, or the hacker will continue to kill implanted patients.
Arnold Gold’s team of cyber detectives must now race the clock to track down the hacker’s identity and stop him before he can kill other innocent victims.
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