Robin Cook

Все книги автора Robin Cook (10) книг

Blindsight
Blindsight

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

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Blindsight
Blindsight

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

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