Former internist Gerritsen follows Harvest (1996) with another far-fetched but effective medical thriller. Toby Harper is an idealistic emergency-room physician who has chosen to work the graveyard shift so she can care for her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. When a disoriented old man walks out of the ER and disappears, Toby finds that she cannot let the case go. She sniffs around Brant Hill, the ultra-upscale retirement village where he lived. Then another Brant Hill resident ends up in the ER with symptoms of disorientation and seizures: Toby worries that some unknown toxin at Brant Hill might be to blame. Or perhaps there's a problem with an experimental hormone protocol being used to restore youth to elderly residents? When the new patient dies, the snooty and evasive medical director for the complex denies the need for an autopsy, but willful Toby diverts the body to the medical examiner, Daniel Dvorak, who also happens to be handsome and divorced. Daniel finds that the old man died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, an extremely rare condition. When another CJD autopsy report shows up for a Brant Hill resident, Toby steps up her investigation. But she is also having trouble at home: The woman she's just hired to help care for her mother has told police that Toby has been physically abusing her parent. However beleaguered, Toby continues her detecting. A local prostitute gives birth to a strange one-eyed baby, who turns out to be a genetically altered factory of sorts, producing multiple pituitary glands. Could the Brant Hill gang be using this fetal tissue as part of their fountain-of-youth protocol, and could an unhealthy embryo have been behind the CJD outbreak? The climactic showdown hyperventilates to the point of silliness, but realism's not the point here. A satisfyingly nefarious scheme, some tentative romance, and enough medical rushing-about to satisfy hardcore ER fans add up to a lively ride.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-671-55303-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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