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Rather too often, Robin Cook tends to repeat himself. This time out, he tries for variety by shifting his locale to India. I wonder how much he is able to claim on his income tax for research for this opus. Fourth year medical student Jennifer Hernandez, who has pretty much been raised by her grandmother, is absolutely horrified to hear on CNN that a woman bearing her grandmother‛s name has died in New Delhi after undergoing hip-replacement surgery. Jennifer and her grandmother were particularly close, since she had largely been raised by the older women after her mother died. She therefore decides to fly off to New Delhi to try to find out what had happened. The action switches to the Queen Victoria hospital where a nurse, Veena, is nervously dispatching a patient who has just undergone surgery. She is horrified when the victim actually looks at her and thanks her for providing what she thinks is an analgesic. Veena is doubly disturbed because she has been told the woman would drift off painlessly. Instead, she goes into violent convulsions. Nonetheless, for the drug to be relatively unobtrusive, it must be employed, rather than some opiate which, in the unlikely circumstance of an autopsy being performed, would make the dirty work very obvious. The reader finds out pretty quickly the reason for the murder. Medical tourism, the term applied to the recent trend of patients seeking cheaper alternatives abroad to elective surgery at home, is rapidly depleting the coffers of American surgeons who are losing their patients to Indian surgeons. Naturally it would benefit their pockets were the Americans to stay at home and avail themselves of home grown services. So how to alter the state of affairs? Easy solution. If the tourists die, people won‛t want to risk foreign death but will happily pay their hard-earned cash, despite lack of medical insurance, for American doctors to provide their services. As one who tends to believe that doctors take the Hippocratic oath seriously on the whole, I found the suspension of disbelief required for this one to be somewhat of a mouthful to swallow. Regardless, Cook‛s books tend to do that to me, though he is hardly alone is this regard. The characterisation here is not as powerful and robust as I‛ve seen in the work of other authors working the same field. It seems a bit rocky to find so many health professionals willing to take lives rather than to save them. I am just grateful that Cook didn‛t include a wicked pharmacist in the cast! All this taken into account, I found the customs and scenery of India to be extremely interesting. The level of corruption is mind-boggling but the burial customs are astonishing. One rather large item of bribery tended to boggle my mind more than the rest of the impossibilities, but the description of it is fascinating - and no, I am not going to disclose what it is. If one has not read a book by this author for some time, it is possible that the reader might find it more fascinating than did I. Nonetheless, it might pay the author to try to change his style or his medium in future novels. Still, I suppose one must pay homage to the notion that if one is onto a good thing, best stick with it.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, August 2008
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