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August 10, 2015
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.

Two masters of their crafts have produced an engaging, if unexceptional, thriller. Cook, author of dozens of medical thrillers, tells the story of a brilliant and fearless medical student who puzzles through mysterious medical mishaps to uncover a cold-blooded plot. George Guidall's warm baritone brings Cook's characters to life, even when their dialogue is a little forced. As always, Guidall's pacing is excellent, his dialogue voices are distinct, and he conveys suspense without distracting the listener from the plot. In this work, Cook has returned to many of the devices he used in his most famous adventure, COMA (1977). Once again, young, healthy patients are failing to wake up from surgery and being sent to a mysterious facility. Technology has been updated. F.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine