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Available: RRP $4.99 All e formats
Heart Stopper is RJ Samuel's first novel, and allows the author the opportunity to explore and demonstrate her first hand medical knowledge.
Opening with the discovery of a dead body, Priya quickly recognises her boss has died and possibly been murdered in his own apartment, where she finds herself but can't remember how she got there.
Part medical drama, part crime thriller, part romantic drama, the story follows Priya as she tried to unravel what happened to her boss that night, her role in his death and a complicated new love interest.
Heart Stopper is right on the money with the scientific detail - reminiscent of early Michael Crichton - and an intriguing love story between two appealing female characters, and both are stories of the heart.
A fantastic first novel that combines drama, attention to detail and a compulsive attraction.
We caught up with author RJ Samuel about the writing process and the story behind Heart Stopper.
Samuel explains, "Heart Stopper was my first novel so I had to do a lot of research on writing novels first. Then I focused on the pacemaker-specific research. My background is in medicine and IT. As I hadn’t been near anything academically medicine-related in over 20 years, I needed to re-learn some basic physiology, learn about the pacemaker/medical devices industry and pacemaker programming, and study electrophysiology.
"I was very conscious that readers in the technology-based thriller genre can be very critical if the technology is not accurate or at least plausible (if invented from scratch). I did not have access to pacemaker specialists (as I was reluctant to take up anyone’s time), so I used old textbooks, websites, company brochures etc. I wanted the details to be as accurate as possible and I wanted to make the scenario as realistic as possible, so I ended up having to work out a plausible technical solution to an invented problem (I’m a little frightened that it could actually work).
"I tried to incorporate it into the story and tried to explain much of the medical side in a non-technical way, in the way I would like to get it as a reader myself. I thought I had managed that, but I do get a few readers who would have preferred less medical detail. And I have to say, when I re-read it after a year, I couldn’t remember my research and found I had to pay close attention when I got to the medical bits. The great thing is that readers have been gripped by the story and the characters and those who don’t seek out medical nitty-gritty have said it didn’t take away from their enjoyment of the book."
As the role of geography plays such an important part in both Heart Stopper and the Vision Painter series, Samuel talks about what Ireland means to her, "I’m only realising now that location has had more of an influence on my writing than I thought. I describe myself as an outsider looking out and my first three books are written from the point of view of characters like that. So my sense of place colours my descriptions i.e. even though I ‘ve live here for almost thirty years, the Ireland I describe might highlight little details that an Irish person living in that location all their lives might not focus on, might not even notice as special.
"My experience of the weather in Ireland, for example, is influenced by my childhood in Nigeria and (a little bit) in India. Again my descriptions of Kerala are based on my visiting there as an outsider who has an ‘in’ i.e. I appear Indian, I have family there, but I have not got the insider’s experience of living there. Sometimes, visiting the locations also has a direct influence on the story line e.g. a character appears in Heart Stopper (and affects the story) who is based on a chance meeting when I went to research an area in Connemara. I’m finding it difficult to write protagonists who should feel like they belong in a location i.e. Irish-born, Irish-grown, Irish-stayed, so I’m having to working twice as hard to describe the locations from their point of view."
On genre, Samuel says "I found it challenging at first to write in the thriller genre. I started Heart Stopper intending it as a pure medical thriller and I tried to follow the rules of writing in that genre, but I found myself telling a story of how an ordinary character would react when facing extraordinary circumstances, circumstances that were not necessarily dramatic and obvious, but were the result of decisions made over a period. Issues came up in the story that I had not expected to write in a medical thriller, - outsider, racism, family, cultural issues.
"As a result, readers and reviewers have expressed a difficulty in categorising Heart Stopper, but the consensus is that it is more than the sum of its individual genres."
By Katie
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