Susan Calvin is entering her second year in Psych residency when this story begins. She has survived the loss of her true love at the hands of terrorists from the SFH - Society for Humanity - and gotten to know N8-C - a positronic robot who could be mistaken for a regular human. She has learned that her father had a large part in the development of the positronic brain and the three laws that govern it.

She has chosen the same beginning site for her second year which lets her be with her friend Dr. Kendall Stevens. Their site has them working with dementia patients which is a difficult thing for Susan who wants to believe that she can fix medical problems. It causes her to wonder about the rationale for prolonging life when the mind is gone. She is also working for a lazy, self-serving boss. When Susan's genius level diagnostic skills suggest that some of her patients have been misdiagnosed and can actually be helped, she is first obstructed by her boss. When she goes around him to prove her diagnoses, he is quick to claim the credit and claim that Susan is the one who was obstructing. Susan, naturally, finds this very frustrating but it becomes quite a minor problem when the death of her father happens.

Susan comes home to find that her father has been murdered. When she tries to see his body to understand what happens, she is obstructed by the police who have decided that his death was because of "natural causes." Susan begins to conduct her own investigation along with one police officer who doesn't want to follow the party line. They soon find themselves at odds with the SFH and a shady government department that wants the secret they are certain she and her father had about the way to separate the positronic brain from the three laws.

Along the way in their investigation, Susan learns a big secret about her past and finds a way to get both the government department and the SFH off her back.

This was an engaging science fiction story. However, I started to get bogged down in all the medical terminology that Susan uses in her diagnoses. Once I decided to treat it all as bafflegab things went better. I don't know if the medical terms are fact or fiction and for the purposes of the bigger story it really didn't matter.

Fans of hard science fiction and fans of Isaac Asimov will enjoy this second book in a trilogy. I would recommend reading the series in order though. ( )

Well, we find ourselves back in Susan Calvin’s life about a year after the first book ends. Just when you think things are going ok for her, the wheels start coming off and we are off for quite a ride. Susan’s father is killed, at least that’s who she thought he was for all these years. Then his body disappears after she finds out that his body was decapitated and then “cremated.” But really it was stolen before the so called cremation took place.
After a beginning like this I’ll let you decide whether to read it or not. If not, you’ll miss a good story. ( )

This is the second in the author's trilogy of spin off novels about the life of Susan Calvin, the robotics pioneer in Isaac Asimov's early robot short stories published from the 1950s onwards. When Asimov wrote, he had Susan being born in 1982 and working on robots in the early 21st century, but now that this is not plausible in the real world timeline, she is instead a young woman of 27 in 2036 (though that date really isn't that far off either). I found the existence of the one or two humaniform robots in this novel rather unrealistic given the early stage robotics is supposed to have reached by this stage. While these factors were also present in the first novel, I think I noticed them more here, as I was not generally as gripped by the plot as I was with its predecessor. Unlike that one, this was not a medical techno-thriller with an unusual theme, but more of a standard thriller involving bad guys out to steal secrets, and a rogue Government agency out to steal those secrets for its own reasons. There was still a fair amount of medical jargon in this book, especially in the first half, this time to do with various stages of dementia, but it wasn't relevant to the main plot. The ending was quite dramatic, though without the emotional impact of the ending of book one. So, a little disappointing overall, though I will read the third book in due course. ( )

The ending was definitely better than the one from the first book. Looking forward to the third one. ( )