Scott Nicholson's lean and mean thriller starts with a bang and doesn't let go. The author of The Red Church, Drummer Boy, The Skull Ring, and many others, takes it up a notch in this schizophrenia-inducing roller coaster ride.

You wake up in a motel room and your wallet contains someone else's ID. In fact, it's not your wallet. You don't remember where you are or how you got there. You know you're not the guy on your license, though. And you don't remember killing the woman in the bathroom. Your name is Roland Doyle, but your ID says you are David Dunn. Meanwhile David Dunn awakens in a rain-soaked alley, confused, running or being chased, blood imagery in his memory, not sure if it's noon or midnight. Needing a new “dose.” Before he can make any sense of it, he's captured and returned to the Monkey House.

Other people—two beautiful women and a drug company representative married to a US senator's staff member begin to suffer relapses and flashbacks and strange accidents, all connected to the doses they need to take on a strict schedule. Their memories play tricks on them. Their fear begins to spike . . . and abate. Then spike again.

Dr. Sebastian Briggs, amoral (not to say “evil”) scientist, is manipulating humans by inducing—and then controlling—visceral fear, in the process reaching into their heads and essentially rewiring their memories and their sense of morality. Welcome to the Monkey House, indeed, the Vonnegut-named warehouse (and series of trials) where the five of the six original subjects are reunited with each other and with their decade-old experiment—and its horrific end results. Was there a murder, or wasn’t there? If there was, did one of them commit it, or the whole group?

Now Briggs, a cruelly mad and disgraced Frankenstein-type is doubling down on his early trials of the drug Halcyon for FDA approval, but he's been running a bait and switch on the government, using the no-longer-innocent subjects to study not only Halcyon, but his secret invention Seethe, a rage drug. David and Roland were part of the original experimental series, as were Wendy (whom Briggs has always lusted for) and Anita, Alex, and Susan. Susan may have been murdered during the trials. Alex has since married Mark, who works for US Senator Burchfield—sponsor of the revival of Briggs's testing. Briggs pulls the strings for the surviving subjects, with the help of jack-of-all-trades hitman Kleingarten. Slowly, the plot threads and the separated principal players are drawn to the warehouse (castle) where they will face their creator amidst a nightmarish scenario of madness, murder, and sex. Like dysfunctional villagers, they’re bringing the axes and pitchforks, but can they hold it—and themselves—together long enough to achieve their goals?

This isn't a book rife with subplots and side roads. It’s pretty much a speeding sedan on an empty highway, leading directly and inexorably to the showdown that must occur. As in Frankenstein, the Creature must confront his Creator. But Nicholson adeptly keeps you guessing which of the artificially psychotic players will manage to rise above the drugs that poison their systems, as well as what will happen when all players are together in the same place. One thing is certain, Briggs—clearly a psycho and sociopath himself—may have bitten off more than he can chew this time, all in the name of lust rather than science.

Every player has an agenda, from a simple shrugging off of the bonds of post-traumatic stress and flashbacks, to encouraging the secret invention of new and better drugs that can be used to control people and induce malicious results. Nicholson skewers the scientific community, the pharmaceutical industry, the ineffectual FDA, portions of the government, the religious right, and pretty much everything in between with a plot that unfortunately can’t be said to be all that fanciful or unlikely—indeed, elements of the overall criminal cover-up and bogus trials and subsidized research hit the papers every other week, it seems, though the media is complicit in rarely portraying the incidents in the harsh light of criticism they deserve. Straightforward and only occasionally mildly purple, Nicholson’s serious yet satirical puppet show makes for a particularly gripping thriller, reminding that fiction can easily reveal more about us than a pallet-load of personal memoirs.