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Was It a Rat I Saw
A young brain scientist, Dr. Clare Austen, must crack the secrets in the mind of a patient who can not remember witnessing the murder of her mentor. A first novel.
437 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1992
5 people are currently reading
284 people want to read
About the author
Sue Perry
21 books54 followersI'm always happy to give free e-copies of my books in exchange for honest reviews. Message me!
According to heart and soul, I am a writer. In fact, writing is the only work that has ever mattered to me. To confirm this, I've been a warehouse clerk, secretary, retail clerk, substitute teacher, bookkeeper, government bureaucrat. Motion picture story analyst, low budget TV producer. Scientific research internship director. Earthquake consultant. Professor. Disaster scientist.
I am a seasoned yet new writer, thanks to a 20-year hiatus. In 1992, Bantam-Doubleday-Dell published my hardcover novel, the psychological thriller Was It A Rat I Saw. Somehow 20 years elapsed and in 2012 I published the literary fiction Scar Jewelry . Since then I've published about one book each year, in a wide range of lengths and genres. Nowadays I'm also getting into digital art.
I live in southern California, where I'm the mother of grown twins and companion to multiple non-humans, currently 3 cats. I spend my time with books, visual arts, live music, beaches, mountains, spiritual pursuits.
My newer novels have playlists on Spotify. Follow scperryz to listen.
According to heart and soul, I am a writer. In fact, writing is the only work that has ever mattered to me. To confirm this, I've been a warehouse clerk, secretary, retail clerk, substitute teacher, bookkeeper, government bureaucrat. Motion picture story analyst, low budget TV producer. Scientific research internship director. Earthquake consultant. Professor. Disaster scientist.
I am a seasoned yet new writer, thanks to a 20-year hiatus. In 1992, Bantam-Doubleday-Dell published my hardcover novel, the psychological thriller Was It A Rat I Saw. Somehow 20 years elapsed and in 2012 I published the literary fiction Scar Jewelry . Since then I've published about one book each year, in a wide range of lengths and genres. Nowadays I'm also getting into digital art.
I live in southern California, where I'm the mother of grown twins and companion to multiple non-humans, currently 3 cats. I spend my time with books, visual arts, live music, beaches, mountains, spiritual pursuits.
My newer novels have playlists on Spotify. Follow scperryz to listen.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 5, 2016
I received a free copy in return for an honest review.
Sue does a great job of taking a very difficult storyline and trying to make it work. While the story is engaging, suspenseful and mysterious, the sheer amount of discussion of process takes the reader out of form detaching them from the quality of the story itself.
The writing creates a vivid mental picture for the reader and draws you into the world. While this novel was Sue’s debut work, I would hope that her more current writing has been able to surpass the problems that plague this one. From the misspellings to the combined fictional prose (heavy medical to suspense), there are many things that cause the reader to stumble and get back into the story for it to work for them.
Overall, a good read that will engage the reader, draw them into a world unlike their own and encourage them to venture down the unbeaten path. I do believe that if this were pushed through a more formal writing process now, the book could be vastly improved and the story structure and language tightened to a position of greater understanding and enjoyment for the reader.
Sue does a great job of taking a very difficult storyline and trying to make it work. While the story is engaging, suspenseful and mysterious, the sheer amount of discussion of process takes the reader out of form detaching them from the quality of the story itself.
The writing creates a vivid mental picture for the reader and draws you into the world. While this novel was Sue’s debut work, I would hope that her more current writing has been able to surpass the problems that plague this one. From the misspellings to the combined fictional prose (heavy medical to suspense), there are many things that cause the reader to stumble and get back into the story for it to work for them.
Overall, a good read that will engage the reader, draw them into a world unlike their own and encourage them to venture down the unbeaten path. I do believe that if this were pushed through a more formal writing process now, the book could be vastly improved and the story structure and language tightened to a position of greater understanding and enjoyment for the reader.
December 28, 2013
Was it a Rat I saw? The first thing to strike you is the passive voice; it is repetitive and endless. The story never gets moving because of the constant drag of things that were happening, or how he, she or it was doing this or that. I normally do not read books written this way but I persevered with this one! The story had no direction for the first thirty pages. We had animal experiments, a break in at the lab mingling with brain surgery mingling with some elaborate tests on humans. I am none the wiser as to what these tests do nor their purpose. A series of random events occurred which seemed to have no relevance and explained very little. Someone asked if there was a murder upstairs and the response was no, it’s a long story…we never did find out any more. I think someone stood outside a fire escape but I might be wrong. There are so many disjointed and separate events in the first section of the book that I have neither idea of the sequence nor the purpose of most of them. I know Tommy is not well.
The second section is no improvement. Cut to a party, or was it a group putting on a show, followed by a walk in a building with many corridors and a random attacker, who is a rank amateur by the sound of things. The death of one member of the staff, Haffner, followed by the death of another, Colton, soon afterwards seemed a little too coincidental. The police officer, Baudine, comes across as an automaton, better suited as a patient of the institute, rather than an investigator. We had a random shooting, cars swerving a lot and a trip home with a hippie. Suddenly we are in an elevator jumping and jerking in a shaft for no apparent reason, with more brain analysis from Clare and a fit for Tommy with a lot more technical detail. I have opposite hemispheres crossed, side by side, reversed and swapped and still I have no idea how it works.
Tommy, not only a patient but also a potential lover for Clare, is central to the story but his malady gets in the way of everything he does up to this point. The constant change of direction and mood is almost impossible to follow. For some reason, a cat gets 227 mentions by name and almost as often by her pronoun or as an article, ‘the cat’. I am at a complete loss to know how a cat can feature so large in a book about brain dysfunction. There is a featured parrot too! Back to the lab and more brain tests, pages and pages of them, more light failures, more analysis of the attacker, yet again then all of a sudden Larry is dead. Who is Larry? I’m afraid I gave up on page 92 but force myself to read on to 100.
This is a sample of conversation;
“Uncle. I give. Alright already.”
“You know much less than you think, which could hinder our efforts
tremendously.”
“I get the drift, you can stop now. I already said I was sorry.”
“No you didn’t.”
Tommy thought back. “Hmm. You got me there.” He unlightened the mood
again: “Don’t you see we’re running out of time?”
“Maybe the police will solve the case and we can stop trying.”
“Ever read their list of unsolved crimes? No one has, it’s too long.”
“The killer’s got to make mistakes at some point.”
“I wonder why we’re still alive,” Tommy said. “Especially since word’s around
that we think I know something. I guess the killer hasn’t heard. Yet.”
“I let Sid Stein think we’re together - to be together,” Clare sighed. “That kind of
‘data’ spreads like a virus. It may buy us some time.”
“Lately I feel so shitty when we leave at night without knowing. I don’t even want
to keep trying.”
“Good attitude.”
My advice would be to rewrite the whole book in the active voice and to delete ninety per cent of the technical brain tests. The structure needs tightening and many of the peripheral characters deleting. I am afraid I have let the author down by not completing the book but I simply have so many other books to read that I could not waste time trying to finish what is an incomprehensible opening with no drama or action conveyed simply because everything happens TO the central character. She does nothing actively and for that reason I gave up.
The second section is no improvement. Cut to a party, or was it a group putting on a show, followed by a walk in a building with many corridors and a random attacker, who is a rank amateur by the sound of things. The death of one member of the staff, Haffner, followed by the death of another, Colton, soon afterwards seemed a little too coincidental. The police officer, Baudine, comes across as an automaton, better suited as a patient of the institute, rather than an investigator. We had a random shooting, cars swerving a lot and a trip home with a hippie. Suddenly we are in an elevator jumping and jerking in a shaft for no apparent reason, with more brain analysis from Clare and a fit for Tommy with a lot more technical detail. I have opposite hemispheres crossed, side by side, reversed and swapped and still I have no idea how it works.
Tommy, not only a patient but also a potential lover for Clare, is central to the story but his malady gets in the way of everything he does up to this point. The constant change of direction and mood is almost impossible to follow. For some reason, a cat gets 227 mentions by name and almost as often by her pronoun or as an article, ‘the cat’. I am at a complete loss to know how a cat can feature so large in a book about brain dysfunction. There is a featured parrot too! Back to the lab and more brain tests, pages and pages of them, more light failures, more analysis of the attacker, yet again then all of a sudden Larry is dead. Who is Larry? I’m afraid I gave up on page 92 but force myself to read on to 100.
This is a sample of conversation;
“Uncle. I give. Alright already.”
“You know much less than you think, which could hinder our efforts
tremendously.”
“I get the drift, you can stop now. I already said I was sorry.”
“No you didn’t.”
Tommy thought back. “Hmm. You got me there.” He unlightened the mood
again: “Don’t you see we’re running out of time?”
“Maybe the police will solve the case and we can stop trying.”
“Ever read their list of unsolved crimes? No one has, it’s too long.”
“The killer’s got to make mistakes at some point.”
“I wonder why we’re still alive,” Tommy said. “Especially since word’s around
that we think I know something. I guess the killer hasn’t heard. Yet.”
“I let Sid Stein think we’re together - to be together,” Clare sighed. “That kind of
‘data’ spreads like a virus. It may buy us some time.”
“Lately I feel so shitty when we leave at night without knowing. I don’t even want
to keep trying.”
“Good attitude.”
My advice would be to rewrite the whole book in the active voice and to delete ninety per cent of the technical brain tests. The structure needs tightening and many of the peripheral characters deleting. I am afraid I have let the author down by not completing the book but I simply have so many other books to read that I could not waste time trying to finish what is an incomprehensible opening with no drama or action conveyed simply because everything happens TO the central character. She does nothing actively and for that reason I gave up.
November 13, 2013
I really wanted to like this book, and for the first several chapters I did. I was fascinated by the split brain phenomena described by Perry; my younger daughter also had brain surgery for epilepsy (in her case, a partial hemispherectomy rather than a commissurotomy), which led to some challenging side effects and personality changes, none of which, fortunately, were as severe as those suffered by Tommy and Cynthia. I think that one of the valuable purposes of literature is to remind us that, no matter how difficult our problems, someone else always has it worse, and Was It a Rat I Saw? certainly convinced me how lucky we were that our daughter came through her surgery comparatively unscathed.
Unfortunately, I soon got to the point where the detailed descriptions of the various tests Clare was running on Tommy were irritating, rather than interesting. It seemed to me that Perry couldn't quite decide what kind of book she wanted to write: a medical thriller à la Robin Cook or a popular exploration of neurological oddities à la Oliver Sacks. In trying to accomplish both, Perry managed to produce neither. The repetitious testing episodes detracted from the pace of the thriller, while the thriller provided an awkward framework for the neurological expositions.
Finally, I found the large number of typographical errors to be distracting. When I should have been engaged in the story, I actually found myself more entertained by the challenge of figuring out the correct word: "poised," not "posed"; "bland," not "land"; "bushes," not "buses"; "wished," not "wised"; "sampling," not "sapling"; and on and on.
Although I can't find it now, I believe I saw somewhere that this was Perry's debut novel, originally published in 1992. As such, it probably is not a fair example of her current writing. While it ultimately got lost in the shuffle, her premise in Was It a Rat I Saw? was sufficiently intriguing that I will be looking for Perry's more recent books.
I received a free copy of Was It a Rat I Saw? from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Unfortunately, I soon got to the point where the detailed descriptions of the various tests Clare was running on Tommy were irritating, rather than interesting. It seemed to me that Perry couldn't quite decide what kind of book she wanted to write: a medical thriller à la Robin Cook or a popular exploration of neurological oddities à la Oliver Sacks. In trying to accomplish both, Perry managed to produce neither. The repetitious testing episodes detracted from the pace of the thriller, while the thriller provided an awkward framework for the neurological expositions.
Finally, I found the large number of typographical errors to be distracting. When I should have been engaged in the story, I actually found myself more entertained by the challenge of figuring out the correct word: "poised," not "posed"; "bland," not "land"; "bushes," not "buses"; "wished," not "wised"; "sampling," not "sapling"; and on and on.
Although I can't find it now, I believe I saw somewhere that this was Perry's debut novel, originally published in 1992. As such, it probably is not a fair example of her current writing. While it ultimately got lost in the shuffle, her premise in Was It a Rat I Saw? was sufficiently intriguing that I will be looking for Perry's more recent books.
I received a free copy of Was It a Rat I Saw? from the author in exchange for an honest review.
January 10, 2014
I received a free copy of this book from the author by way of Smashwords.
I think Sue Perry writes quite well but this book doesn't hit it out of the park for me. Maybe a good, solid single.
The problem as I see it is that there's no clear demographic for this book to appeal to. In Was it a Rat I Saw Perry goes into exacting, almost painful, detail about human split brain experimentation. While I trust her delineation of the process, the sheer amount of detail can be horribly boring. At least to me. And I work in science research and have to face those same boring and repetitive experiments myself. But I admit there's no doubt a number of people who would be fascinated by this rigorous attention to detail. Unfortunately there's also a very detailed rendering of the emotional aspects of two couples breaking up and shuffling things up a bit. There's also a significant audience for that form of novel. But combining the two fiction formats in one book? It just seems to me that too many people would be alienated by either the science or the relationship pathos. But if these things appeal to you, this is the book you've been looking for.
There's also a anti-vivisection subplot that's hinted at a lot. It only takes up a percent or two of the novel but it's quite vivid!
I think Sue Perry writes quite well but this book doesn't hit it out of the park for me. Maybe a good, solid single.
The problem as I see it is that there's no clear demographic for this book to appeal to. In Was it a Rat I Saw Perry goes into exacting, almost painful, detail about human split brain experimentation. While I trust her delineation of the process, the sheer amount of detail can be horribly boring. At least to me. And I work in science research and have to face those same boring and repetitive experiments myself. But I admit there's no doubt a number of people who would be fascinated by this rigorous attention to detail. Unfortunately there's also a very detailed rendering of the emotional aspects of two couples breaking up and shuffling things up a bit. There's also a significant audience for that form of novel. But combining the two fiction formats in one book? It just seems to me that too many people would be alienated by either the science or the relationship pathos. But if these things appeal to you, this is the book you've been looking for.
There's also a anti-vivisection subplot that's hinted at a lot. It only takes up a percent or two of the novel but it's quite vivid!
January 26, 2009
I've always been fascinated by the inner workings of the brain, and this book introduced me to an area of scientific research I hadn't been familiar with: the split brain. Used most frequently as a prevention against life-threatening seizures, the two hemispheres of the brain are surgically divided, leaving the right and left sides of the brain largely unable to communicate with each other. This leads to interesting side effects, such as when you're trying to get dressed, and your right hand is buttoning your shirt, while the left is following behind, unbuttoning.
In this book, a split-brain patient witnesses a murder - but only with the non-vocal right side of his brain. Through scientific experiments, he and his doctor struggle discover a way for both sides of his brain to communicate and identify the killer before the killer manages to kill again - and they themselves are both on his list of targets.
Full of fascinating true-life medical detail and an exciting mystery, this book is a must-read!
In this book, a split-brain patient witnesses a murder - but only with the non-vocal right side of his brain. Through scientific experiments, he and his doctor struggle discover a way for both sides of his brain to communicate and identify the killer before the killer manages to kill again - and they themselves are both on his list of targets.
Full of fascinating true-life medical detail and an exciting mystery, this book is a must-read!
November 13, 2013
I originally entered the Goodreads giveaway for this book. I did not win a paper copy but was given the chance to download the book for free from Smashwords. I am very happy that I took advantage of it!
This is a very intelligent book. I learned a lot about neuroscience and research while reading a good mystery. I did have trouble with the beginning of the book. It was very dry as the author laid the scientific groundwork for the story. Once the story kicked in, it became harder to put the book down.
The only complaint I have is that there were a LOT of misspellings, especially after I got halfway through the book. One or two isn't that big a deal but in some places it was so bad it changed the meaning of the sentence. I am sure this was a formatting issue and not due to the author.
This is a very intelligent book. I learned a lot about neuroscience and research while reading a good mystery. I did have trouble with the beginning of the book. It was very dry as the author laid the scientific groundwork for the story. Once the story kicked in, it became harder to put the book down.
The only complaint I have is that there were a LOT of misspellings, especially after I got halfway through the book. One or two isn't that big a deal but in some places it was so bad it changed the meaning of the sentence. I am sure this was a formatting issue and not due to the author.
December 23, 2013
. Couldn't really get into this story. The plot seemed to move along so slowly. I had to skip over any scenes describing the poor lab animals. Some editing would have been helpful, and I just didn't find the protagonists to be that likeable.
October 18, 2013
Very interesting book. I love medical and when you mix medical and murder its just wonderful. What more can you ask for.
I highly recommend this wonderful book
I highly recommend this wonderful book
March 24, 2016
3.2ish stars.
Fascinating psychological elements. Liked it.
Fascinating psychological elements. Liked it.
December 31, 2013
THIS IS A GOOD MEDICAL MYSTERY IF YOU LIKE MEDICAL RESEARCH MIXED WITH MURDER THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU
January 13, 2014
This took me three days to read and I was in suspense all the time. This is what I expect from a good suspense novel. A must read for anyone who enjoys this genera.
December 4, 2014
Fascinating Read!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews