About the Book:
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You may win $1,000,000. You will judge a man of murder.
An eccentric scientist tells you he can read your mind and offers to prove it in a high-stakes wager. A respected college professor exacts impassioned, heat-of-the-moment revenge on his wife’s killer—a week after her death—and you’re on the jury. Take a Turing test with a twist, discover how your future choices might influence the past, and try your luck at Three Card Monte. And while you weigh chance, superstition, destiny, intuition and logic in making your decisions, ask yourself: are you responsible for your actions at all? Choose wisely—if you can.
Read an Excerpt from The Friar's Lantern
You scarcely have time to take stock of the room before you hear the door close behind you, and you turn to face a short, slight, balding man in a long white lab coat and glasses.
“Welcome,” he says. “I am Dr. Pavlov.” He pronounces it “Pahv-love” without the nasal American “a.”
You can’t decide if you heard him correctly. Dr. Pavlov? That has to be a joke, right? But you recover your senses in time to shake his hand and introduce yourself.
Dr. Pavlov seems just the sort of unassuming man you’d expect to find cooped up in a rundown laboratory next to an abandoned parking lot at the far end of an obscure university. His feet shuffle noiselessly as he walks, and his shoulders round forward in the posture of a man who has spent too many years bent over a computer or a lab bench, and you check yourself as you grasp his hand so as not to crush this poor man’s fingers. Yet his grip is firm and steady as he applies just enough pressure to give your unsuspecting palm an uncomfortable squeeze, and as he pumps your hand once and releases, you look up into his green eyes and find them equally unflinching as they bore into yours with a force that registers somewhere between casual curiosity and a penetrating measure of your character.
“Do you know why you are here?” he asks.
You shake your head. “Something about an MRI and predicting behavior, but I don’t know all the details.”
“Well, you are right so far. It is quite simple, really,” Pavlov says with the trimmed precision of a foreign-born tongue. He indicates the receptionist. “We will use functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to capture images of your brain. During the fMRI scan, I will communicate to you through your headphones and monitor your brain’s activity from our control room.” He indicates a long, narrow, glass-paned room to his right filled with an array of computer monitors. “You will also view several video sequences and will be asked to perform basic tasks, such as pushing a button. If at any time you wish to end the scan, you merely squeeze the control which you will hold in your left hand.”
You cast a wary glance at the ominous donut behind you. The hole seems to have grown smaller since you last looked at it.
“How long will it take?” you ask.
“The scan will last approximately 30 minutes,” Pavlov says. “Are you ready to begin?”
“I guess so,” you answer.
“Good. Gloria will prepare you for the scan and show you how to use the controls while I initiate the MRI sequence. Do you have any other questions?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Very well,” Pavlov says. “We will start once you are ready.”
“Lie down on the table, please,” Gloria tells you as Pavlov exits the room.
You take a seat on the edge and swing your legs up to recline into the shallow scooped-out table covered with thin white paper, craning backward to gaze into the mouth of the fMRI as it prepares to swallow you head first. It appears you are about to be launched into some time travel vortex. Gloria gives you two controls: a black plastic rod with a red button at the end to hold in your right hand, just in case you time travel to an episode of Jeopardy, and a rubber turkey baster bulb for your left that you can squeeze in panic to stop the scan. She touches a control on the side of the table, and it hums upward until level with the hole. She then wraps a wide cloth strap over your chest and arms and another one over your thighs and anchors them securely on the opposite side of the table.
About the Author:
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Greg Hickey started writing his first novel the summer after he finished seventh grade. He didn't get very far because he quickly realized he preferred playing outside with his friends.
Eight years later, he began to find a better balance between writing and life. He wrote the early drafts of his first screenplay Vita during his last two years of college. Vita went on to win an Honorable Mention award in the 2010 Los Angeles Movie Awards script competition and was named a finalist in the 2011 Sacramento International Film Festival.
After college, he spent a year in Sundsvall, Sweden and Cape Town, South Africa, playing and coaching for local baseball teams and penning his first novel, Our Dried Voices. That novel was published in 2014 and was a finalist for Foreword Reviews' INDIES Science Fiction Book of the Year Award.
Today, he still loves sharing stories while staying busy with the other facets of his life. He is a forensic scientist by day and endurance athlete and author by nights, lunches, weekends and any other spare moments. After his post-college travels, he once again lives in his hometown of Chicago with his wife, Lindsay.
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