We are not alone…Earth – today, we go about our everyday business. Tomorrow, it doesn't matter: The Invaders from Space have arrived. And for all the worst reasons… Humanity is about to be brought face to face with the most dangerous enemy it has ever faced, at the worst possible time. But the aliens don't care – they have only one goal – the complete conquest of the Earth and converting us to their religion, by any means necessary. From Texas, to Australia, to the Holy Land, the bitter struggle for victory rages, with millions of innocent lives caught in the crossfire. Victory is our only hope for survival…But can humanity stand a chance when the enemy holds all the cards?
Christopher Nuttall , Robin Cook
From award-winning author Brian Keene comes a darkly suspenseful tale of crime and the common man–with a surprising jolt of the supernatural…Tommy O’Brien once hoped to leave his run-down industrial hometown. But marriage and fatherhood have kept him running in place, working a job that doesn’t even pay the bills. And now he seems fated to stay for the rest of his life. Tommy’s just learned he’s going to die young–and soon. But he refuses to leave his family with less than nothing–especially now that he has nothing to lose. Over a couple of beers with his best friends, John and Sherm, Tommy launches a bold scheme to provide for his family’s future. And though his plan will spin shockingly out of control, it will throw him together with a child whose touch can heal–and whose ultimate lesson is that there are far worse things than dying.
Brian Keene , Robin Cook
J. A. Huss , Robin Cook
From Publishers WeeklyCook's lack of ability as a stylist generally has been masked by his talent for fashioning a solid medical drama-often ripped from current headlines-that keeps readers turning pages. Unfortuately, that's not the case in his 12th novel (after Vital Signs), which has a plot so ludicrous that the weak characters and silly dialogue are all too obvious. Most offensive in the latter category are the stilted, out-of-kilter exchanges between a pair of Mafia hitmen who run about New York City "whacking" (murdering) people with increasing frequency. Meanwhile, Dr. Laurie Montgomery, a forensic pathologist in the NYC Medical Examiner's office, finds a pattern of unrelated cocaine overdose deaths among career-oriented people never known to have used drugs. Despite the obvious evidence that she's onto something, her boss couldn't care less, while the homicide detective she becomes involved with is more concerned about the mob killings, and, like her boss, cannot understand why she is outraged by the behavior of two corrupt, thieving uniformed cops in her department. As luck would have it, there's also another man in Laurie's life, a self-centered ophthalmologist whose patients just happen to include the mob boss behind both the cocaine deaths and the murder spree. Readers who plow through this amateurish effort will guess the ending long before any of the characters has a clue.From Kirkus ReviewsAn ironically revealing title for ophthalmologist Cook's fuzziest novel in years-an awesomely inept medical/crime thriller about a forensic pathologist up against the mob. As the story opens, the mind of one Duncan Andrews is ``racing like a runaway train,'' his lethargy having ``evaporated like a drip of water falling onto a sizzling skillet.'' Hours and several more clich‚s later, the ``Wall Street whiz kid'' is dead of a cocaine overdose and lying on the autopsy table of generic Cook heroine (young, spunky, pretty doc) Laurie Montgomery, an N.Y.C. medical examiner. Days and several more dead yuppies later, Laurie is convinced that someone is flooding the upscale market with bad cocaine. Of course, no one will listen to her-not her boss, who wants to chill this political hot potato; not silver-tongued, gold- plated ophthalmologist Jordan Scheffield, who's wooing her with limos and swank dinners; not cop Lou Soldano (``a bit like Colombo''), to whom Laurie explains the exact difference between ophthalmologists, optometrists, and opticians and who wants to woo her with his sedan and spaghetti but can't match Jordan's glitz and anyway is busy worrying about the mob-related corpses stacking up next to the yuppies in Laurie's morgue. For meanwhile, in scenes stiff with clich‚, two mobsters are blowing away a seemingly random group of citizens on orders from mob kingpin Paul Cerino, who, Laurie learns, is one of Jordan 's patients-and who deals coke. Laurie sleuths; the mobsters lock her in a coffin; Laurie sobs; the mobsters let her out; Laurie remembers the flammable properties of ethylene, handily within reach, and blows up the mobsters. Finally, Laurie dumps Jordan for Lou, and she and the cop talk about the motives behind the whole ``horrid affair''-which owe more than a little to Coma. A slack and ragged retread, with Cook parodying himself in a tale that's about as stylish and suspenseful as an eye-chart.
Robin Cook
Cook ( Coma ; Blindsight ) lures us into his newest medical thriller easily and sustains our interest until the very end, despite lots of medispeak. Bad news: the characters are one-note players. Boston Irish "townie" Sean Murphy blazes through Harvard and Harvard Medical School, then leaps at the chance to spend part of his internship at a Miami clinic with a 100% remission rate for a particular type of cancer. He also wants to avoid making any commitment to beautiful nurse Janet Reardon, a Boston blueblood. But he's barred from the top-security cancer research lab, and then Janet arrives to work at the clinic, too--she's "aloof and untouchable" but not above chasing Sean, the dashing "Black Irish" with "Mediterranean" features. Dodging a suspicious security chief, an imperious clinic exec and a spying Japanese researcher, Sean and Janet gamely decide to "look into this medulloblastoma business." After the predictable chasing around south Florida, Sean holds the clinic head and his bikini-clad wife hostage in a research lab surrounded by cops while conducting experiments to prove that the clinic is involved in a dastardly plot to fake research results. At one point Sean and Janet are trailed by the security chief, two clinic hirelings, three Japanese would-be kidnappers and a psychopath who kills women suffering from breast cancer. As Sean says, "This is worse than Stephen King." Literary Guild main selection.
Two months since the stars fell...Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...
Peter Watts , Robin Cook
Robin Cook is the author -- and Coma is the book -- for which the term "medical thriller" was first used. It's a spine-chilling shocker about a crime beyond imagining and the committed young medical student who brings it to light.The surgery was routine -- the kind performed many times a day at Boston's most prestigious hospital. The teams that worked in OR #8 were among the best in the world. But even their incredible skill couldn't make up for what was happening around them. Several patients, admitted to the hospital for minor surgery, never awoke. For some inexplicable reason, their brains had been destroyed.
Amazon.com ReviewFans of Robin Cook's many thrillers will be happy. In this latest outing, Invasion, Cook envisions a contact with extraterrestials that is closer to Alien than to E.T.. A gigantic spaceship arrives in the stratosphere to dump some black disks onto Earth. Touch these things at your own risk, however; unsuspecting souls who handle the disks receive a sting, soon followed by flulike symptoms and ending in a kind of zombie assimilation into the alien consciousness. And make no mistake: these aliens are up to no good--we know this because the victims of the UFO-flu are soon transformed into hideous reptilian creatures.Apparently, one consequence of being trapped by the aliens is that victims lose all semblance of natural speech--most notably, contractions. The book abounds in dialogue such as, "You must flee, Cassy," and "The electrical grid has been interrupted. There will be no force counteracting the antigravity ..." Still, readers looking for a good beach or bathtub book will find Invasion is right on the money.
Like many of Cook's earlier novels ( Coma , Brain , Fever ), this overheated medical thriller covers a hokey, old-fashioned contrivance the creation of a mad scientist runs amok with a veneer of cutting-edge technology. The result resembles an ancient, none-too-scary horror movie played out on modern sets. The author's version of evil genius Dr. Frankenstein is Dr. Victor Frank, a bio-physicist who is driven by his wife Marsha's infertility to create a monster: a son whose genetic structure has been designed to preordain brilliance. Keeping the experiment a secret from his wife, he implants similar embryos in two other women as well. ("When I did it, it seemed like a good idea," he claims, in one of the novel's funnier lines.) A decade later, his work goes awry; the other children die mysteriously, and Marsha realizes that something about her smart son isn't quite normal he has no emotions. (Readers may wonder why, as a child psychologist, she took 10 years to notice.) Cook's characterization is perfunctory even by genre standards, and his initially suspenseful story collapses under the weight of clumsy action scenes and twists that rupture the internal logic of an already shaky premise.
A gigantic drug firm has offered an aspiring young doctor a lucrative job that will help support his pregnant wife. It could make their dreams come true - or their nightmares...