Allen Wyler is a neurosurgeon who left practice in 2002 to be Medical Director for a medical technology start-up, Northstar Neuroscience, which went public (NSTR) in 2006. Leveraging a love for thrillers since the early '70s, Wyler began writing fiction and published his first book in 2005. At the end of 2007 he retired to devote full time to writing. He served as Vice President of the International Thriller Writers organization for several years and has been nominated twice for a Thriller Award. He lives in Seattle.
In Wyler’s 7th installment of the Deadly Odds techno-thriller series, Deadly Odds 7.0, reformed hacker Arnold Gold and his team are contracted to come up with a daring plan to sneak past newly installed AI-enhanced security systems to hack the computers and offices at a high-profile Seattle law firm in an ultra-secure downtown office building—while squaring off against the clock and a hard-driving, paranoid Head of Security, Itzhak Mizrahi.
Allen Wyler stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching his novels:
I’m a native Seattleite who, at the University of Washington, made the mistake of majoring in English Literature with the intention of applying for medical school; a choice that turned into a class-scheduling combination from hell. So, I ended up with a BS degree in Basic Medical Sciences, entered med school and went on to become a neurosurgeon. As satisfying as that career was, the specialty didn’t allow for a great deal of creativity. I mean, who wants their brain surgeon to get super creative during the removal of a tricky tumor? For years I suppressed a squeaky little voice buried in consciousness crying out to scratch a creative itch. Then, one Saturday I came home from making hospital rounds and announced to my wife that I was going write a novel. A thriller, to be exact because that’s the genre I love. At which point she collapsed on the floor in laughter. That did it! I sat down to start in. Eventually I turned out a thriller about a hacker, Radical Dood, that seriously sucked as evidenced by the reams of rejection letters that followed. Still, I kept at it.
Why hackers, might you ask? Well, because years before, as an Assistant Professor at the UW, I ran a neurophysiology lab in which experiments were controlled by a minicomputer, for which I had to write proprietary software, so I knew a little about the subject. A few years later Clifford Stoll wrote a non-fiction book, Cuckoo’s Egg. Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab who tracked down a hacker in their computer who was stealing classified information for an international spy ring fueled by cash, cocaine, and the KGB. Wow! Pretty engrossing stuff. I was totally hooked on the subject.
Years later a literary agent replied to a query letter with the advice that although my style was “commercial,” a neurosurgeon writing about hackers really wasn’t going to cut it. That in order to land a contract I needed to write what I knew. In other words, “write a medical thriller, stupid.”
So, I wrote a Deadly Errors, a thriller about a hacked electronic medical records system. It scored two-book contract with Tor/Forge. Although medical thrillers were fun to write, I still fantasized writing about hacking.
Switching publishers allowed me the freedom to publish Deadly Odds, originally a stand-alone about twenty-three-year Seattle-based odds-maker and computer genius, Arnold Gold. Described as a “part-time hacker and full-time virgin” by his friends, Gold flies to Las Vegas to try to get lucky—in more ways than one. But his high stakes internet activity inadvertently drops him into a vortex of international terrorism that results in murder and takes every last bit of Arnold's intellect and legendary skill to stay one step ahead of murderous terrorists, the FBI, the local cops and his lawyer. In other words, a quintessential thriller. My publisher and I loved the character I’d stumbled on, so decided I should turn Deadly Odds into a sequentially numbered series similar to software iterations. However, each episode can be read and enjoyed as a standalone.
The series chronicles Arnold’s arc toward maturity as a male, his personal life, and his career as a businessman who is building a select group of “white hat” hackers into IT team specializing in serving the unique needs of law firms that, for various reasons, aren’t keen on opening their highly confidential files to unknown IT techs. In Deadly Odds 7.0 Arnold’s team is contracted by a high-powered law firm to break into their ultra-secure downtown offices by bypassing the building’s newly installed AI security enhancements while also squaring off against the clock and a hard-driving, paranoid Head of Security. These contracted break-ins represent a security-testing tactic known as penetration testing.
To help answer numerous questions that spring up during story development, I’ve developed a terrific team of consultants that include cybersecurity experts as well as law enforcement agencies such as Seattle and King County police and the FBI.
You can learn more about Allen Wyler and his writing via his website and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Deadly Odds 7.0 is available via Stairway Press and all major booksellers.
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