Typical Cook: lifeless dialogue, weak prose, and hokey plot, but a sound message: ambitious doctors and scheming politicians...
Public antagonists become conspirators as a medical entrepreneur performs a controversial operation on a duplicitous politician.
In an afterword, Cook (Shock, 2001, etc.) warns us that political prohibitions against embryonic stem-cell research are misinformed and will only make things worse. Here, they’re bad enough for Dr. David Lowell, a brilliant, egotistical, and bit greedy researcher who quits Harvard to found a struggling for-profit company that will, he hopes, make millions when it develops a complicated technique involving embryonic cloning that has cured Parkinson’s in mice. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, antiabortion Senator Ashley Butler heads a subcommittee considering a bill that will ban the procedure. Called to testify before the committee, Dr. Lowell fails to persuade the senator that his technique isn’t killing babies, and Lowell is later contacted by the senator’s aide, Carol Manning, for a secret meeting. It turns out the senator has Parkinson’s and is willing to stall the bill in his committee, as well as pay hundreds of thousands in secret PAC money to Lowell and his sexy, competent lover and business partner, Dr. Stephanie D’Agostino, to perform the operation on him secretly, with two conditions: that this be done in the Bahamas at the new Wingate Clinic, and that the cloning involve DNA taken from blood residues on the Shroud of Turin. The senator offers to sponsor a bill limiting the amount of damages in lawsuits against charities—just as a New York cardinal wants in wake of the church’s sex scandals. Calls are made to the Vatican, and, while getting the sample in Turin, the doctors have their first of many brushes with danger, involving priests, Mafiosi, and other types tainted by incompetence, greed, and irrational fears. Despite all, the doctors actually pull off the operation, though Murphy’s Law takes over in ways no one can expect.
Typical Cook: lifeless dialogue, weak prose, and hokey plot, but a sound message: ambitious doctors and scheming politicians only increase the suffering that, deep down, both want to cure.Pub Date: July 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14876-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.
A Harvard freshman investigates the suicide of her schizophrenic brother and finds herself chasing a conspiracy and hearing the voices of the dead.
Cady Archer is determined to attend Harvard even though her beloved older brother, Eric, killed himself there. Considered a genius in math and science, Eric suffered from schizophrenia but had stopped taking his prescriptions, and his yearlong mental health spiral into paranoia and delusion still haunts Cady and her parents. Cady is attending Harvard against her mother’s wishes, but she’s driven by a need to understand what happened the night Eric died. Her quest leads her to a handsome, seductive friend of Eric’s, the professor with whom he was working on a secret project, and something more troubling: voices in her head. Is Cady suffering from schizophrenia, too? Or are the voices she’s hearing truly ghosts, real people who once lived on the Harvard campus and faced their own dilemmas there? The question of Cady’s mental health is interesting, and Serritella—best known for the essay collections she writes with her mother, thriller writer Lisa Scottoline (I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses, 2018, etc.)—brings the famous campus to life in a vivid way. She also effectively explores the aftermath of loss and grief on a family. But Serritella is on shaky ground once the story veers into the supernatural. Cady’s conversations with the ghosts are tiresome and ultimately don’t add much to the narrative. In fact, they detract from what could have been a solid psychological thriller. Her conversations with Bilhah, a slave who is terrified her son will be sold away from her, feel uncomfortably like pandering. The book is repetitive and far too long, and though the endgame strives to shock readers with twists, it's ultimately unsatisfying.
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51036-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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