Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham

Published by Forge Books on April 9, 2013 

I winced a few times as I read Code White. It's a reasonably good thriller with some serious flaws.

Dr. Ali O'Day is pregnant and she's not quite sure whether that condition was caused by her husband Kevin or her head of neurosurgery, Richard Helvelius. Kevin, a software geek, has been working with Helvelius to develop an artificially intelligent gadget called SIPNI that, when implanted into the brain, will enhance or replace designated neurological functions. Kevin (who shares his lab with a lock-picking monkey) has also created a chatty, argumentative Artificial Intelligence he calls Odin. It's obvious from the opening pages that Kevin and Odin are up to something nefarious.

Helvelius and Ali hope that the first implantation of SIPNI will restore eyesight to a young boy named Jamie. Harry Lewton, in charge of hospital security, deals with a bomb threat during Jamie's surgery that was allegedly made by a Muslim terrorist group. Ali's Muslim brother is a suspect in the bomb threat, making Ali the unluckiest doctor to ever star in a thriller, with both a husband and a brother who seem to be involved in evil schemes.

I give Scott Britz-Cunningham credit for imagining a clever (if not entirely believable) scheme that involves greed and revenge. As you might expect from a medical thriller, the best scenes, those with the most tension, take place in the operating room. Many other aspects of Code White are well done. When it focuses on the present, the story moves at a crisp pace and generates the kind of tension that readers hope to find in a thriller. The interaction between the bullying FBI agents and Ali is convincing, as are the scenes involving security teams responding to the bomb threat.

Although Britz-Cunningham's prose style is competent, it occasionally betrays an amateurishness that marks this as the work of a first time author. Stilted dialog reads as if it were borrowed from a 1940s movie. Characters who lack a medical school education tend to speak as if they were hillbillies. Harry tells a story about his life as a cop that's intended to humanize him, but it's too ridiculous to believe. Harry's mother is a patient in the hospital, a heavy-handed attempt to create sympathy for Harry. Too many expository paragraphs, often telling us about a character's past, interrupt the story's flow. Britz-Cunningham's characters have summative conversations for the benefit of the reader when, in real life, they would have no reason to tell each other things they already know. Doctors deliver lectures (as doctors tend to do) which also impede the drama. At some point the bad guy explains the scheme in an improbable flood of words -- improbable because the confession imperils the scheme. Conversations about romance tend to be cheesy and Ali's discussion of her motherly feelings about Jamie is completely over the top, as are the mishmashed love stories, all centered on Ali.

In the end, although the out-of-control-computer scenario has been done to death, my enjoyment of large parts of the story outweighs those parts that made me cringe. Code White is a capable effort and a promising start for a thriller writer. Britz-Cunningham knows how to generate excitement, but he needs to learn how to sustain it as he develops his characters. If he sticks to medical themes, stays away from overdone plots, and learns to polish his prose a bit, he'll become a noteworthy writer.

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