Good news: Cook ( Coma ; Blindsight ) lures us into his newest medical thriller easily and sustains our interest until the very end, despite lots of medispeak. Bad news: the characters are one-note players. Boston Irish ``townie'' Sean Murphy blazes through Harvard and Harvard Medical School, then leaps at the chance to spend part of his internship at a Miami clinic with a 100% remission rate for a particular type of cancer. He also wants to avoid making any commitment to beautiful nurse Janet Reardon, a Boston blueblood. But he's barred from the top-security cancer research lab, and then Janet arrives to work at the clinic, too--she's ``aloof and untouchable'' but not above chasing Sean, the dashing ``Black Irish'' with ``Mediterranean'' features. Dodging a suspicious security chief, an imperious clinic exec and a spying Japanese researcher, Sean and Janet gamely decide to ``look into this medulloblastoma business.'' After the predictable chasing around south Florida, Sean holds the clinic head and his bikini-clad wife hostage in a research lab surrounded by cops while conducting experiments to prove that the clinic is involved in a dastardly plot to fake research results. At one point Sean and Janet are trailed by the security chief, two clinic hirelings, three Japanese would-be kidnappers and a psychopath who kills women suffering from breast cancer. As Sean says, ``This is worse than Stephen King.'' Literary Guild main selection. (Jan.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
YA-- The Forbes Cancer Center in Miami is experiencing unprecedented cure rates for patients stricken with medulloblastoma. Sean Murphy, a bright, brash, Harvard medical student, takes an elective at the center to learn as much as he can about the procedures and treatments. The icy atmosphere that greets him, coupled with a warning to stay away from the unit in question, fuels Sean's determination to discover why everything is veiled in such secrecy. To carry out his investigation, he enlists the help of his girlfriend, Janet Reardon, a nurse. These self-appointed detectives find themselves chased by a variety of factions and in trouble with the law before unearthing the horrible truth. The unfolding of events is totally implausible, but Cook weaves an action-packed story that is fun to read.-- Grace Baun, Robert E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Sean Murphy, a third-year medical student at Harvard, has gone down to the Forbes Cancer Center in Florida to do a two-month project. The rough-edged South Boston Irishman, however, really wants to find out more about the center's remarkable cure rate for patients with medulloblastomas. His girlfriend, nurse Janet Reardon, follows him south. Robert Harris, Forbes' chief security officer, takes an immediate dislike to Sean, with his long hair and smart-ass attitude, but ultimately helps save the day (and the lives of both Janet and Sean). Dr. Deborah Levy, director of research, blasts in and out of the picture and turns out to be the second cleverest character on the scene. The most unusual individual involved is a housekeeper, Tom Widdicomb, who has been putting women cancer patients out of their misery with the unspoken advice of his frigid mother (she's in a freezer in the family garage). Cook tells a beautifully woven story--keeping the various individuals and plots in meaningful operation--and winds up with a dramatic hostage-and-research denouement.
No other bestselling author crunches the language quite like Cook, but he does know how to make his pages fly—which is what made last year's dull Blindsight so unforgivable. Not so this newest, which finds Cook back on track—like a runaway locomotive—with a manically entertaining thriller. Sean Murphy is a brash son of Boston's Irish ghetto, a reformed thief whose brains have gotten him into Harvard Med. Now Sean's heading for Miami's Forbes Cancer Center, which has a mysterious 100% success rate treating medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Once south, though, Sean finds that the Center's head, Randolph Mason, wants him to work not on the "medulloblastoma protocol" but on crystallizing "murine monoclonal antibodies" (Cook pours on the medical know-how here). Moreover, Janet Reardon, the nurse/lover Sean dumped in Boston, has followed Sean to Forbes. But never mind: Sean decides to steal Forbes's research and give it to the world, and to enlist Janet's help. When Forbes's Japanese backers learn of Sean's aim, though, they send an assassin after him; but the killer has to get in line behind the p.i. that Mason has hired to look into Sean, and the Nazi-like head of Forbes security—not to mention Forbes's resident orderly/serial-killer (no threat to Hannibal Lecter, though he does keep his dead mom in a freezer) who's been "liberating" patients, and who decides that Janet is on to him. A madcap chase to Key West and back winds up with Sean taking Mason hostage. Will a SWAT team neutralize Sean before he can prove that the medulloblastoma protocol is key to an evil scheme to fund the money-starved Clinic? All this antic action, and a Message about the financialplight of medical research too: So what if Janet finds her heart "pounding and knowing her face is flushed"? Chalk up another big one for Cook. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for Winter)
"A spellbinder." —The Houston Chronicle
