OUTBREAK

by Robin Cook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 16, 1986

Since his ace first novel, Coma, Cook's authorial skills have atrophied, despite exercise in a series of medical chillers (Brain, Fever, Godplayer, Mindbend). But here he concocts a premise--epidemic viral outbreaks in hospitals--that generates the momentum to make this his most enjoyable novel in years, albeit one flawed with his usual hackneyed cast, implausible plotting, and Marvel Comics literary style. The heroine here is Centers for Disease Control (CDC) invesitgator Marissa Blumenthal, a young M.D. to whom Cook donates--symptomatic of his lazy-man's approach to writing--a physical description identical to Genevieve Bujold's (star of the film version of Coma). When Ebola, a deadly African virus, surfaces in a prepaid health clinic in L.A., Marissa flies in to investigate. More than 20 die before she and a team led by her boss, Dr. Cyrill Dubchek, contain the virus and return to Atlanta. There, Dubchek, whose advances Marissa spurned in L.A., cold-shoulders her efforts to pinpoint the virus' source and mode of spread. After two subsequent outbreaks, a pattern emerges: the vires appears only in prepaid health clinics, and the original carrier was always mugged fight before his illness. Smelling a rat, Marissa transforms into Nancy Drew with stethoscope. Her investigation eventually leads her to the same silly conclusion the reader will have come to a hundred pages earlier; a cabal of private-practice M.D.'s is infecting prepaid health clinics in order to undermine group medical care. Since for Marissa to take the obvious step of turning to the police would result in a too-short book, Cook has her fly around the country, threatening the conspirators with exposure and battling her way past several hired killers on her tail. In a frenzied conclusion frayed with loose threads, she realizes--again, long after the reader--that her boyfriend, to whom she has run for help, is in on the plot; but Dubchek, more friend than foe, saves her in the nick of time. Cook's grasp of the mechanics of mystery plotting is minimal; his clues loom up like Himalayas above the wasteland of his prose. Still, his flair for spooky medical situations is here in full force, while the depictions of viral containment procedures are fascinating. And--he knows how to ham things up: Outbreak is mind-numbing, but it's fun.

Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION