Man, that's a surprisingly layered question for a book that looks like a straightforward medical thriller. Everyone assumes it's the scrappy young surgeon fighting the system, but the real protagonist is the whistleblower, Dr. Lena Vance. The whole narrative hinges on her discovering a fatal flaw in the hospital's new AI diagnostic tool and her impossible choice between her career and exposing the truth. It's her moral descent, her paranoia as colleagues turn on her, that drives every chapter. The other characters orbit her central crisis.
I've seen some arguments for the senior hospital administrator, framing it as a corporate cover-up story from his perspective, but Lena’s the one whose conscience we inhabit. That moment she realizes the 'fatal error' log has been manually deleted? The book stops being about medicine and becomes a survival horror story set in an office park. She’s not even particularly likable, which makes her more compelling—she’s arrogant, ambitious, and totally unprepared for the ethical quagmire she falls into.