Liam Durcan got great reviews for his first book, a collection of stories called A Short Journey by Car.

In fact, it was chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of the Top 100 Books of 2004.

Durcan's debut novel, Garcia's Heart, has just been published by McClelland & Stewart. It picks up the various themes of the collection - the individual and the state, medicine - and builds on them to create a compelling and complex study of ethics and choice.

Born in Winnipeg, Durcan practises neurology in Montreal, where he teaches at McGill University. He came to writing late, he admits.

"In the late '90s," he says. "I was getting more interested in writing but I never published anything."

The author says positive feedback from his writing workshops encouraged him to submit some of his work for publication.

"I've always been a big reader, and I've always been interested in, well, everything, so it seemed natural to emulate the work I like," he says.

Garcia's Heart tells the story of Patrick Lazerenko He's a neurologist like Durcan but Patrick abandons medical practice to go into business. He uses his knowledge of the science of decision-making to start a consulting company specializing in neuro-economics - the science of figuring out why people buy things. It's made him rich.

Growing up an aimless teenager in Montreal, Patrick becomes friends with the owner of a neighbourhood store. Hernan Garcia is a generous and wise man, an immigrant from Honduras who is a pillar of the community. Young Patrick is shocked to find out that Garcia was a doctor, a respected cardiologist, in his homeland. Although he wonders why his mentor stopped practising, Lazerenko nonetheless follows his footsteps into medicine.

Events take a dramatic turn years later when Garcia is arrested for war crimes, for participating in torture while fighting Communist insurgents in Honduras in the early 1980s. He's on trial in the Netherlands and Patrick feels compelled to take a leave of absence from his burgeoning company to observe his old friend.

"I got to thinking of neuroscience research," Durcan says of the novel's central theme, "the neuroscience of decision-making. Moment to moment, we're making hundreds of decisions.

"But it's those rare decisions that we agonize over that make the decision process apparent."

Things become even more complicated when Lazerenko becomes reacquainted with Garcia's adult children, including his daughter Celia, whom Patrick had dated years before.

The reader, and Patrick, wonders if the two will reconcile, but it seems unlikely as their differences become more apparent over time, highlighted by their contrasting reactions to the trial of Hernan Garcia.

Celia is focused on getting her father released and will work with anyone who might be able to accomplished that feat, while Patrick is more ambivalent, trying to determine for himself Garcia's guilt or innocence.

"There are so many ways to react to traumatic events," Durcan says. "Celia is pragmatic. Patrick missed the objectivity he finds in the sciences.

"By the end of the book, Patrick understands that Hernan's feelings were genuine. If there's anything redemptive in the book, that's it."