Blending a witch's brew of weird science and unbridled greed, Cook's (Cell, 2014, etc.) newest medical thriller will boost the blood pressure of anyone facing hospitalization. Lynn Peirce and Michael Pender are fourth-year medical students at Mason-Dixon University Medical Center, part of Middleton Healthcare conglomerate. With graduation coming, Michael is Boston-bound and Lynn is anticipating an engagement ring from lawyer Carl Vandermeer. Then Carl is hospitalized for knee surgery. He comes out of the operation comatose and in a persistent vegetative state. Serendipitously, the Shapiro Institute, a "state-of-the-art-facility" for PVS patients, is nearby. It's an affiliate of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals, a high-tech drug manufacturer owned by a reclusive Russian billionaire. Risking expulsion from medical school and violating HIPAA privacy standards, Lynn and Michael learn that Shapiro's true purpose is far more nefarious than providing "automation, computerization, and control of infection" for PVS patients. Affordable Care Act aside, Cook's formulagreed and medicine are a lousy combinationstill works. As one character notes, "even the so-called nonprofit hospitals are money mills in disguise." Cook's other villain is an easy targetinternational pharmaceutical corporations, the sort that spend more on advertising than research. That leads to motive: "biologics, or drugs made by living systems," are a multibillion-dollar market, and Shapiro has a way to make them cheap and quick. Add esoteric terminologyhybridomas, gammopathy, doll's eye reflexplus Russian ex-special forces assassins, and the action ramps up from threats and coercion to rape and murder. Lynn is an anemic protagonist, while Michael, an African-American athlete and scholar from a poor family, is better sketched but verging on clich. The bad guys are off-the-shelf Villains 'R' Us, but the Shapiro Institute, where the Mission Impossible final chase scene takes place, is sci-fi nightmare material. Essentially a rewrite of Cook's first blockbuster, Coma (1977), plugging in big pharma and amoral Russian oligarchs as 21st-century villains. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In Cook's latest thriller, a medical student, distraught after the unexpected death of her boyfriend following what was supposed to be no-risk surgery, uncovers a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the medical establishment and could risk her own life if she tries to bring the conspirators to justice. If this all sounds a tad familiar, it's because Cook has told variations of this same story numerous times. Devoted fans might enjoy this one, of course: it will feel familiar and comfortable. But after 20-odd novels not counting the multivolume Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery series Cook may have gone to the conspiracy well a few too many times, and some of his fans might detect a certain blah feeling in the story, as if even the author is beginning to lose interest. The quality of the writing is consistent with his other novels, too: competent but not noteworthy and with moments of jarring inadequacy, as if first-draft sentences and paragraphs have somehow made it into the finished book. Cook has name value to many readers, of course, and this one will draw interest, but it could peak quickly.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist

Bestseller Cook's engrossing medical thriller revisits themes from 1977's Coma. Lynn Peirce, a fourth-year medical student at the Mason-Dixon University Medical Center in Charleston, S.C., has her life upended when her lawyer boyfriend, Carl Vandermeer, suffers severe brain damage during a routine orthopedic procedure. Baffled by what went wrong, Lynn and a colleague, Michael Pender, turn detective to find answers. But they only come up with additional questions when they learn that Carl wasn't the only patient at the hospital to suffer such complications, and they discover more about a state-of-the-art high-tech facility affiliated with Mason-Dixon that houses patients in vegetative states. A prologue alerts the reader to the existence of a conspiracy through the journal entries of another victim of bad medicine, Kate Hurley, who ends up murdered during a "horrific home invasion." Cook does a good job of making the medicine intelligible, though the ending may strike some as stretching credulity a bit too far. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.