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Deborah Cochrane and Joanna Meissner are two Harvard coeds working on their doctoral dissertations. One day they find in their college newspaper a personal ad looking for egg donors. For whatever reason, the Wingate Infertility Clinic is willing to pay forty-five thousand dollars per person to young and healthy Harvard coeds who want to help women with infertility problems. Deborah and Joanna are skeptical at first but after an interview and some careful research, they decide to go through the process. There is some suspicious behavior going on at the clinic but both ladies are oblivious to the situation. One of the two students is working on her doctorate in biology. She does not seem to notice the warning signs glaring all around her. Once the procedures are over, Deborah and Joanna take the money and leave to start their new lives. For the past fourteen months, both ladies have been living in Italy where they work on their dissertations every morning, sightsee in the afternoons, and party at night. Now that they both finished their respective papers, they are ready to go back to the States. When they return, one of them is curious as to the state of her eggs and is curious to learn what has been their fate. They contact the Wingate Infertility Clinic and get the runaround citing confidentiality agreements. In a flash of inspiration, Deborah and Joanna perform an undercover operation to get access to their records, but get more than they bargained. The clinic is doing illegal and unethical experiments at the expense of unsuspecting women. Will Deborah and Joanna learn the truth before it is too late? Who knows? By the time the story reaches its ambiguous conclusion, the reader will not care. Shock is the worst book to ever come out of the mind of Robin Cook. How this work came to be published is the bigger mystery. The problems with this novel are numerous to count. These two allegedly brilliant women take careful measures to change their identities and physical appearances in order to get work at the Wingate Infertility Clinic in what is supposed to be a one-day operation. They go to several extremes to avoid being recognized that they make too many obvious mistakes. After cold calling the clinic looking for a job, they get an interview for the next day and get hired to work that same day. Why bother doing background, security, and reference checks? They are just a waste of time. Can these undercover, amateur detectives trust anyone at the clinic? But of course, , .The only redeeming factor this book has is how bad the book is. English professors should flock their local bookstores and use Shock as an example of how not to write a thriller. Every mistake,with the sole exception of spelling and grammar, that can be done in telling a story is done in this book. If this book was written by a frustrated and unpublished amateur writer or a flunking English grad student this review would be more lenient. How can a best selling author with over twenty years of experience hand in this manuscript? Why did his editor accept and publish it? These are questions that will never be answered. Every bestseller author has a great work and a lousy one. Shock is easy to determine. Everything else would be a waste.
Reviewed by Angel L. Soto, January 2003
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