Intervention

June 15, 2009
In this uneven medical thriller from bestseller Cook (Foreign Body
), Dr. Jack Stapleton, a New York City forensic pathologist who lost his first wife and their two children in a plane crash, is devastated when his newborn son by his second wife is diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma. As a diversion from his efforts to find a cure for his son, Stapleton seeks to expose unscrupulous practitioners of alternative medicine. In particular, he investigates the death of a healthy woman whose vertebral arteries were damaged by a chiropractor. Then the plot swerves into Da Vinci Code
territory as two of Stapleton's college friends—the archbishop of New York and an archeologist—battle over skeletal remains that may be those of the Virgin Mary. When the characters themselves comment on the events as something out of a horror movie or a book, suspension of disbelief becomes even more of a challenge (e.g., “He felt like he was a participant in a kind of unfolding real-life mystery-thriller”).

August 1, 2009
Seems everybody else has been on lost-codex-shakes-ancient-religion turf. Why not Cook (Foreign Body, 2008, etc.)?

Jack Stapleton has had better years. Once a promising eye doctor, he's disappeared into the morgue, having retrained as a forensic pathologist and, in the bargain, lost his young family to disaster. In his 50s and remarried, he has a young boy with"high-risk neuroblastoma, the worst kind." (We learn all this about Jack in just a few paragraphs, for Cook knows how to deliver a brief on a character that would fit on the front page of a medical chart.) Conventional medicine isn't doing the trick, and Stapleton fears the worst. While conducting an autopsy on a young woman whose life has been terminated by a bad chiropractic session—her vertebral arteries looking"like two small headless red snakes who'd swallowed something blue"—he delves into a careful exploration of alternative medicine, a journey that takes him from the local Barnes& Noble into more challenging venues. Enter college buddy Shawn Daughtry, who is on his fifth wife and having a fine time of it as an Indiana Jones–ish biblical archaeologist. Now, if you're going to have an alternative cure for an illness of epic proportions, it might as well be divine, and one of Shawn's discoveries may just fill the bill. So, too, might one of its complications, which is the need to get down into the bowels of Saint Peter's Basilica and poke around among the bones—a chore that, naturally enough, has all sorts of theological implications. Conveniently, Stapleton has another pal who is now the archbishop of New York, on whom those implications are not lost. All of this puts us squarely into Dan Brown territory, save that, unlike Brown, Cook can write up a storm and spin a taut tale, every chapter of which ends on a cliffhanger all the way up to an unforeseen conclusion. In the hands of a master, in other words, such confections have real possibilities—and Cook more than delivers.

Just the book for the beach bag—or a transatlantic flight to Rome or Jerusalem.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 20, 2009
Cook's 28th medical thriller (after Foreign Body) again features married medical examiners Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery but focuses on Jack, as he and two old college buddies-one an archaeologist, the other the archbishop of New York-become entangled in an international intrigue with the potential to rock the foundations of Catholicism. The catalyst is an ossuary excavated from beneath St. Peter's Basilica that may contain the bones of the Virgin Mary. The mystery dominates the novel-which also veers into more emotional and medical terrain, as Jack's young son falls seriously ill. Verdict Despite an abundance of talk and a surprising absence of action, Cook's latest is compelling. Recommended for fans of medical and religious thrillers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/09.]-A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
The author of more than 20 medical thrillers strikes again. A forensic pathologist, Jack Stapleton, becomes embroiled in an archaeological mystery that could forever alter the relationship between medicine and religion. The fast-paced story moves around geographically, from New York City, where Jack lives, to Egypt, where Jacks old friend, archaeologist Shawn Daughtry, makes a startling discovery, to Rome, where Jack and Shawn team up to help a mutual friend protect the Church from the implications of Shawns discovery. The mixture of traditional medical thriller and historical thriller is provocative, and, as usual, the inventive story should keep Cooks fans turning the pages. Unfortunately, the novel is consistent with much of Cooks previous work in another, considerablyless fortunate way. It reads like a clumsy first draft by a novice writer. The dialogue is, for the most part, hopelessly amateurish; frequently passages, or even entire conversations, are pretexts for explaining things to the reader (as when one character asks another to define the term gnosticism), often when no explanation is necessary (as when a character exclaims that the year AD 121 is the near the beginning of the second century). Background information about the lead characters is dispensed in large, unwieldy chunks rather than gradually throughout the story. The characters themselves are paper-thin collections of traits and motivations. While the book will likely appeal to Cooks established audience, it is distinctly inferior to offerings by such medical-thriller writers as Michael Palmer, Tess Gerritsen, and Daniel Kalla.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)