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Summary
Summary
New York Times-bestselling author Robin Cook returns with another ripped-from-the-headlines medical thriller, where DNA science, biotechnology, and religion collide. It's been more than thirty years since New York City medical examiner Jack Stapleton's college graduation and almost as long since he'd been in touch with former classmates Shawn Doherty and Kevin Murray. Once a highly regarded ophthalmologist, Jack's career took a dramatic turn after a tragic accident that destroyed his family. But that, too, is very much in the past: Jack has remarried, to longtime colleague and fellow medical examiner Laurie Montgomery, and is the father of a young child. But his renegade, activist personality can't rest, and after performing a postmortem on a young college student who had recently been treated by a chiropractor, Jack decides to explore alternative medicine. What makes some people step outside the medical establishment to seek care from practitioners of Eastern philosophies and even faith healers? Jack's classmate Shawn Doherty is now a renowned archeologist and biblical scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose taste for good wine and generally deteriorating health are taking a toll on his career. He has recently obtained permission for a final dig beneath Saint Peter's, and despite his long-standing grudge against the Catholic Church, begins his research, which eventually takes him to Jerusalem and Venice--only to make a startling discovery with ecclesiastical and medical implications. And when Kevin Murray, now Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, gets wind of Shawn's findings, he's desperate to keep them from the public. Kevin has strong political ambitions within the Church, but his association with Shawn threatens to undermine them. Kevin turns to his old friend Jack to help protect an explosive secret, one with the power to change lives forever.
Author Notes
Robin (Robert William Arthur) Cook, the master of the medical thriller novel, was born to Edgar Lee Cook, a commercial artist and businessman, and Audrey (Koons) Cook on May 4, 1940, in New York City. Cook spent his childhood in Leonia, New Jersey, and decided to become a doctor after seeing a football injury at his high school. He earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1962, his M.D. from Columbia University in 1966, and completed postgraduate training at Harvard before joining the U.S. Navy. Cook began his first novel, The Year of the Intern, while serving on a submarine, basing it on his experiences as a surgical resident.
In 1979, Cook wed Barbara Ellen Mougin, on whom the character Denise Sanger in Brain is based.
When Year of the Intern did not do particularly well, Cook began an extensive study of other books in the genre to see what made a bestseller. He decided to focus on suspenseful medical mysteries, mixing intricately plotted murder and intrigue with medical technology, as a way to bring controversial ethical and social issues affecting the medical profession to the attention of the general public. His subjects include organ transplants, genetic engineering, experimentation with fetal tissue, cancer research and treatment, and deadly viruses. Cook put this format to work very successfully in his next books, Coma and Sphinx, which not only became bestsellers, but were eventually adapted for film. Three others, Terminal, Mortal Fear, and Virus, and Cook's first science- fiction work, Invasion, have been television movies. In 2014 her title, Cell made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this uneven medical thriller from bestseller Cook (Foreign Body), Dr. Jack Stapleton, a New York City forensic pathologist who lost his first wife and their two children in a plane crash, is devastated when his newborn son by his second wife is diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma. As a diversion from his efforts to find a cure for his son, Stapleton seeks to expose unscrupulous practitioners of alternative medicine. In particular, he investigates the death of a healthy woman whose vertebral arteries were damaged by a chiropractor. Then the plot swerves into Da Vinci Code territory as two of Stapleton's college friends-the archbishop of New York and an archeologist-battle over skeletal remains that may be those of the Virgin Mary. When the characters themselves comment on the events as something out of a horror movie or a book, suspension of disbelief becomes even more of a challenge (e.g., "He felt like he was a participant in a kind of unfolding real-life mystery-thriller"). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The author of more than 20 medical thrillers strikes again. A forensic pathologist, Jack Stapleton, becomes embroiled in an archaeological mystery that could forever alter the relationship between medicine and religion. The fast-paced story moves around geographically, from New York City, where Jack lives, to Egypt, where Jack's old friend, archaeologist Shawn Daughtry, makes a startling discovery, to Rome, where Jack and Shawn team up to help a mutual friend protect the Church from the implications of Shawn's discovery. The mixture of traditional medical thriller and historical thriller is provocative, and, as usual, the inventive story should keep Cook's fans turning the pages. Unfortunately, the novel is consistent with much of Cook's previous work in another, considerably less fortunate way. It reads like a clumsy first draft by a novice writer. The dialogue is, for the most part, hopelessly amateurish; frequently passages, or even entire conversations, are pretexts for explaining things to the reader (as when one character asks another to define the term gnosticism), often when no explanation is necessary (as when a character exclaims that the year AD 121 is the near the beginning of the second century). Background information about the lead characters is dispensed in large, unwieldy chunks rather than gradually throughout the story. The characters themselves are paper-thin collections of traits and motivations. While the book will likely appeal to Cook's established audience, it is distinctly inferior to offerings by such medical-thriller writers as Michael Palmer, Tess Gerritsen, and Daniel Kalla.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Seems everybody else has been on lost-codex-shakes-ancient-religion turf. Why not Cook (Foreign Body, 2008, etc.)? Jack Stapleton has had better years. Once a promising eye doctor, he's disappeared into the morgue, having retrained as a forensic pathologist and, in the bargain, lost his young family to disaster. In his 50s and remarried, he has a young boy with "high-risk neuroblastoma, the worst kind." (We learn all this about Jack in just a few paragraphs, for Cook knows how to deliver a brief on a character that would fit on the front page of a medical chart.) Conventional medicine isn't doing the trick, and Stapleton fears the worst. While conducting an autopsy on a young woman whose life has been terminated by a bad chiropractic sessionher vertebral arteries looking "like two small headless red snakes who'd swallowed something blue"he delves into a careful exploration of alternative medicine, a journey that takes him from the local Barnes Noble into more challenging venues. Enter college buddy Shawn Daughtry, who is on his fifth wife and having a fine time of it as an Indiana Jonesish biblical archaeologist. Now, if you're going to have an alternative cure for an illness of epic proportions, it might as well be divine, and one of Shawn's discoveries may just fill the bill. So, too, might one of its complications, which is the need to get down into the bowels of Saint Peter's Basilica and poke around among the bonesa chore that, naturally enough, has all sorts of theological implications. Conveniently, Stapleton has another pal who is now the archbishop of New York, on whom those implications are not lost. All of this puts us squarely into Dan Brown territory, save that, unlike Brown, Cook can write up a storm and spin a taut tale, every chapter of which ends on a cliffhanger all the way up to an unforeseen conclusion. In the hands of a master, in other words, such confections have real possibilitiesand Cook more than delivers. Just the book for the beach bagor a transatlantic flight to Rome or Jerusalem. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cook's 28th medical thriller (after Foreign Body) again features married medical examiners Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery but focuses on Jack, as he and two old college buddies-one an archaeologist, the other the archbishop of New York-become entangled in an international intrigue with the potential to rock the foundations of Catholicism. The catalyst is an ossuary excavated from beneath St. Peter's Basilica that may contain the bones of the Virgin Mary. The mystery dominates the novel-which also veers into more emotional and medical terrain, as Jack's young son falls seriously ill. Verdict Despite an abundance of talk and a surprising absence of action, Cook's latest is compelling. Recommended for fans of medical and religious thrillers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/09.]-A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
