The "duhs" outnumber the thrills in the 81-year-old Cook's latest.
After his wife, Emma, contracts deadly eastern equine encephalitis and he gets taken for an obscene ride by a predatory health insurance company, ex-cop Brian Murphy fights back.
When he and Emma retired from the NYPD's elite Emergency Service Unit to start a high-end personal protection security firm, they signed up for a short-term health insurance policy they didn't bother to read. After Emma falls ill following a mosquito bite and their 4-year-old daughter, Juliette, sinks into mysterious symptoms of her own, Murphy is left in an increasingly desperate state as uncovered bills soar near $200,000 and hospital officials and doctors give him the cold shoulder. He finds an ally and superior babysitter in Jeanne, a French-born woman with a background in child psychology he meets in the waiting room of a medical billing advocate. She was victimized by the same health insurance company after her husband suffered a heart attack, received inadequate treatment, and died. Oh, to have been in France, where their health care system is "so, so much better." Those expecting another outbreak thriller from the prolific author of Pandemic (2018) and Contagion (1995) will be disappointed to encounter what is largely a diatribe against the American health care system. It certainly deserves to be taken on, but Cook's priggish lectures about this hotbed of "personal greed trumping altruism" stop the novel in its tracks. The same confrontations are staged over and over, with the protagonist seemingly unable to read the writing on the wall or recognize obvious things until long after the reader has. And what the reader will see as unhinged behavior on Murphy's part, Cook somehow sees as reasonable. The book can be oddly compelling but goes off the rails in any number of ways.
The "duhs" outnumber the thrills in the 81-year-old Cook's latest.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32829-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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