Pandemic

October 15, 2018
When a seemingly healthy woman collapses on a subway train in Manhattan and dies shortly afterward from an unknown cause, New York City medical examiner Jack Stapleton, the hero of this unremarkable thriller from bestseller Cook (Charlatans), suspects viral pneumonia—and fears that the city might be on the verge of a pandemic. Since the woman’s phone and purse were stolen from her as she lay dying in the subway car, she’s declared a Jane Doe when she’s delivered to Bellevue Hospital. A tattoo on the body eventually leads Jack to identify her as Carol Stewart, who recently received a heart transplant but, oddly, has no trace of immunosuppressants in her system. Jack’s investigation, aided by a colleague who is, naturally, a stunningly attractive woman, leads him to butt heads with his wife, Laurie, the head of the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, who wants to avoid an unnecessary panic. A maverick, Jack isn’t afraid to ignore Laurie’s orders in his quest for the truth behind Carol’s death. Cook offers nothing that genre readers haven’t seen before.

November 15, 2018
If Cook's latest were about 75 pages shorter, it might have been a lean, mean medical thriller. As it is, the book feels a bit bloated. Characters tell each other things they probably should already know, for the benefit of the reader. They engage in the kind of small talk that suggests they are generally bad at small talk. The story meanders when it should accelerate. All of which is too bad, really, since the plot, which involves a handful of strange-circumstance deaths, an inquisitive medical examiner (Jack Stapleton, Cook's go-to protagonist), and a rather nasty megalomaniac, is quite interesting. Cook's greatest skill lies in his ability to take some new medical development and build a fictional story around it; that approach tends to bring built-in hooks?here it's gene modification run amok?that the medical-thriller crowd can't resist. Devoted fans will certainly take a bite of this one, too, but the book's excessive wordiness may deter those sampling Cook for the first time. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The Cook brand will sell this one, even if the product is not up to par.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2018

A young woman dies on the New York City subway, evidently from a particularly vicious strain of the flu. But the autopsy reveals that she'd had a heart transplant, with her DNA inexplicably matching that of the heart, and after two similar cases, Dr. Jack Stapleton finds himself in the midst of a biotech conspiracy. From the medical thriller master.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.