Robin Cook's foray into cutting-edge, cutthroat science takes him into realms where medicine, biotechnology, DNA research, and religion all intersect. At the center of the action is Dr. Jack Stapleton, a former ophthalmologist whose mid-career restlessness has led him to investigate the alternative medicine practices that his colleagues routinely disdain. His questioning leads him to the door of Shawn Doherty, an old classmate who is now a renowned archaeologist and biblical scholar. What begins as a simple inquiry about healing swiftly becomes a probe into some of the best-kept secrets of the Church Fathers, and at least one of those clerics is determined to stop Jack and Shawn at any cost. A medical thriller with a generous helping of Da Vinci Code atmosphere.
Publishers Weekly
In this uneven medical thriller from bestseller Cook (Foreign Body), Dr. Jack Stapleton, a New York City forensic pathologist who lost his first wife and their two children in a plane crash, is devastated when his newborn son by his second wife is diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma. As a diversion from his efforts to find a cure for his son, Stapleton seeks to expose unscrupulous practitioners of alternative medicine. In particular, he investigates the death of a healthy woman whose vertebral arteries were damaged by a chiropractor. Then the plot swerves into Da Vinci Code territory as two of Stapleton's college friends-the archbishop of New York and an archeologist-battle over skeletal remains that may be those of the Virgin Mary. When the characters themselves comment on the events as something out of a horror movie or a book, suspension of disbelief becomes even more of a challenge (e.g., "He felt like he was a participant in a kind of unfolding real-life mystery-thriller"). (Aug.)
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Kirkus Reviews
Seems everybody else has been on lost-codex-shakes-ancient-religion turf. Why not Cook (Foreign Body, 2008, etc.)?Jack Stapleton has had better years. Once a promising eye doctor, he's disappeared into the morgue, having retrained as a forensic pathologist and, in the bargain, lost his young family to disaster. In his 50s and remarried, he has a young boy with "high-risk neuroblastoma, the worst kind." (We learn all this about Jack in just a few paragraphs, for Cook knows how to deliver a brief on a character that would fit on the front page of a medical chart.) Conventional medicine isn't doing the trick, and Stapleton fears the worst. While conducting an autopsy on a young woman whose life has been terminated by a bad chiropractic session-her vertebral arteries looking "like two small headless red snakes who'd swallowed something blue"-he delves into a careful exploration of alternative medicine, a journey that takes him from the local Barnes & Noble into more challenging venues. Enter college buddy Shawn Daughtry, who is on his fifth wife and having a fine time of it as an Indiana Jones-ish biblical archaeologist. Now, if you're going to have an alternative cure for an illness of epic proportions, it might as well be divine, and one of Shawn's discoveries may just fill the bill. So, too, might one of its complications, which is the need to get down into the bowels of Saint Peter's Basilica and poke around among the bones-a chore that, naturally enough, has all sorts of theological implications. Conveniently, Stapleton has another pal who is now the archbishop of New York, on whom those implications are not lost. All of this puts us squarely into Dan Brown territory, save that, unlikeBrown, Cook can write up a storm and spin a taut tale, every chapter of which ends on a cliffhanger all the way up to an unforeseen conclusion. In the hands of a master, in other words, such confections have real possibilities-and Cook more than delivers. Just the book for the beach bag-or a transatlantic flight to Rome or Jerusalem.
