MIRACLE CURE

Manhattan AIDS researchers hold off announcing the discovery of a cure for the disease until they find who is murdering their prize patients—in a medical thriller by the author of Play Dead (1990). Dr. Bruce Grey, who is supposed to be on vacation from his AIDS research clinic, slips back into New York in disguise and checks into a hotel, where he is promptly tortured and pitched from a window. The killer is a hulking sadist with a taste for Armani suits who has previously killed two of Dr. Grey's case studies on orders from someone in a group of very powerful gentlemen who, for various reasons, want to keep Dr. Grey's miraculous cure from reaching the public. The cabal includes a senator whose own son is a secret patient at the clinic; a spectacularly odious televangelist whose sermons would have to be reworked if AIDS were beaten; a villainous federal-health bureaucrat; and a physician whose cancer research keeps losing funds to the higher-profile disease. The same doctor is father to two gorgeous daughters—one a slightly crippled network news star married to an NBA star who has been diagnosed with AIDS and whom the clinic is trying to save, the other a nymphomaniac who has developed a big crush on Dr. Harvey Riker, the late Dr. Grey's partner in research. Meanwhile, closeted gay NYPD homicide detective Max Bernstein is the policeman on the beat. Lt. Bernstein enlists the help of the reporter in sorting it alt out. Time is of the essence since the basketball star has been kidnapped from the clinic and spirited to Bangkok, where there are no anti-AIDS shots. Lurid, formula medical thriller—enhanced by celebrity look-alikes, rich and famous scenery, and shadowy sex.