Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the hospital, the king of medical malfeasance (Terminal, 1993, etc., etc.) shows why managed care makes life equally dangerous for idealistic doctors and their patients. Eager to flee the urban blight of Boston, budding pathologist Angela Wilson and her internist husband David are ripe for job offers from Bartlet Community Hospital, nestled in the bucolic hills of Vermont. They won't have to lock the doors on their sumptuous new house; their precocious daughter Nikki, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, will be able to have a dog; and together they'll be making over $125,000 a year (!). But there's trouble in paradise: Angela's paternal boss is a crude lecher; David is constantly under pressure from Charles Kelley, the scalawag regional manager of the monopolistic local HMO, to cut costs to the bone; the corpse of their dream house's former owner, a cranky retired hospital administrator who shot off his mouth too much, is walled up in their basement; Angela is attacked by a rapist who's obviously employed by the hospital; and, scariest of all, an awful lot of people with either terminal illnesses or life- insurance policies in favor of Bartlet are checking into the hospital but failing to check out. The HMO refuses to underwrite the costs of autopsies (are they covering up something, or just being obsessively stingy?); the apathetic, incompetent local lawmen are no more help; the old-boy administrators laugh at Angela's claims of sexual harassment and show her the door; and David, who's obviously never read a Robin Cook novel, surveys their tribulations with the sage comment: ``We might have lost our jobs, but as long as Nikki is okay we'll manage.'' Written with Cook's usual complete lack of interest in language and character—two administrators arise from frenzied rutting to a detailed discussion of cost-containment—but so canny in joining his trademark medical paranoia to his audience's likely alarm about draconian cutbacks under managed care that you can expect sales to go through the roof. Watch your back, Hillary Clinton. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for March)
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13879-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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