by Leslie Alan Horvitz
HARVEST by Tess Gerritsen Pocket Books, $22 ISBN 0-671-5530
THE THIRD PANDEMIC, Pierre Ouelette Pocket Books, $23 ISBN 0-671-52534-4
THRESHOLD, Ben Mezrich HarperCollins, $24 ISBN 0-06-01732-5
MAGIC BULLET Harry Stein Island Books (paper), $6.50 ISBN 0-44D-21808-X
THE KINDLING EFFECT Peter Hernon Morrow, $24 ISBN 0-688-14298-2
As a subgenre the medical thriller has always had a built-in appeal. Most of us will manage to slip through life without being pursued by murderers and the chances that male readers will become hopelessly entangled with a femme fatale are (sadly) minimal. It's even a safe bet to say that few of us will have any dealings with private investigators, particularly the ones who are chronic alcoholics and several months behind in their rent. Fewer still will actually become private investigators. Let's face it: what the majority of mysteries offer is escapism from the routines and debts (financial and otherwise) of daily life. But medical thrillers, even the mediocre ones, exert a perverse fascination on us. Not everyone has gone under the knife or awakened groggy and disoriented in a recovery room; not everyone has been subjected to callous treatment at the hands of a medical professional, but everyone knows somebody who has.
And we have only to turn on the news to learn about potential dangers lurking in the air we breathe, the food we eat (and shouldn't) and the beverages we drink (and shouldn't). And what the hell is in those pills our doctor told us to take? Turns out that, while they're curing us of one disease, they may be slowly giving us another. To put it another way: medical thrillers come too close to home and we read them for the same reason we stop to look at the carnage of an auto crash. What a shame, we think, secretly gratified that it wasn't our mangled bodies that paramedics are trying to pull from the wreckage.
Although the subgenre owes much of its recent popularity to Robin Cook ("Coma") and Michael Crighton ("Terminal Man"), the newer practitioners have clearly been inspired by the breathtaking speed of medical advances that offer hope and terror in equal measures. We all may live a lot longer in the future -- that's the good news. The bad news is we might not like it.
With all that's happening in fact -- genetic innovation, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, etc. -- one would think that novelists would be bursting with inspirations, eager to exploit the fears that all of these issues arouse. The time is sure to come when physicians will be able to inform prospective parents that their three-month old fetus is likely to suffer from a debilitating disease by age twenty or will be crippled by chronic depression or alcoholism. What do the parents do? What use is such information if nothing can be done about it? But far from rising to the challenge, novelists --- at least if the following sampling is any indication -- have reverted to form. They're like pianists all referring to the same fake book.
You want to write a medical thriller? Here's the prescription (forgive the pun): Your hero or heroine should be young and good-looking, ingenious, full of courage and curiosity, but a touch naïve. He or she should be lured to a major research institution dominated by a charismatic and brilliant figure who, however, has some unfortunate authoritarian tendencies. The protagonist should quickly finds a lover who either works for the institution or has some dealings with it. There should be some sex, but don't over do it: stick with romantic platitudes and then put them to work finding out what is really going on at the institute.
There should be some mysterious deaths. You should make certain to include a scene (now de rigour in suspense films, too) where the hero/heroine sits down in front of a computer terminal and tries to access secret files. Don't forget to put your hero and heroine in danger, wait as long as you can to expose the nature of the conspiracy, and don't by any means allow the deadly biological agent to escape....
We'll begin with HARVEST, the only novel reviewed here to have actually been written by a physician (now retired). The plot hinges on one of medicine's most intractable problems: how to obtain enough donor organs for all those who need them. The protagonist is young, attractive Dr. Abby DiMatteo who works at Boston's Bayside Hospital with her boyfriend, Mark, an ambitious physician. Significantly, Mark has been tapped to join a crack cardiology team which performs all the heart transplants. Ethical standards hammered out by the medical community require that priority for donor organs be given to those who are in direst need of them. But, as Abby quickly discovers, this isn't what is happening at Bayside. Connections and money seem to count for more.
A decision to provide a heart, intended for a dying boy, to the wife of a hospital benefactor galvanizes Abby to take matters (literally) into her own hands. In the novel's most exciting scene (and probably the reason why Paramount Pictures bought rights to the book), Abby kidnaps the heart, as it were, and arranges for the boy to receive the transplant at another hospital. Of course, this move triggers off a cascade of events that lunges Abby ever deeper into a conspiracy involving the harvesting of hearts. And where are these hearts coming from? From unsuspecting Russian boys held against their will aboard a freighter traveling to the US. Why Russian boys? Why a freighter? Don't ask.
Another spunky (and young...and attractive) heroine is Elaine Wilkes, the protagonist of THE FOURTH PANDEMIC. Elaine works for the medical research division of Uni, which is one of those multinational conglomerate with tentacles everywhere. She and her colleagues are developing a computer simulation in an effort to predict the nature of the next devastating worldwide pandemic. (The first was the bubonic plague of AD 541; the second was the Black Plague of the Middle Ages; the third the flu pandemic of 1919 which took the lives of 18 million people in just four months.) To everyone's surprise, the simulation identifies the most likely culprit as a lethal bacterial agent, and not a virus. The agent, dubbed Agent 57, is supposed to have a 72% of becoming a reality in the next decade. Readers won't have to wait that long: Agent 57a is already being created as various microbes hook up in a series of serendipitous encounters. Think of a stew to which a cook keeps adding ingredients until one spoonful is sufficient to wipe out half of Manhattan. In this instance the ingredients come from a diseased parrot in Africa, a diseased rat in Peru, and a syphilitic whore in Brazil. The reader is invited to watch Agent 57a mutate and strengthen. (If anything, Agent 57a is a more fully realized character than most of the characters it infects.) In anticipation of the deadly outbreak, the head of Uni orders an antidote made. Of course, he doesn't intend to share it once it's created. Alerted to his intentions, Elaine steals the formula for the antidote and flees, setting off a cascade of events that plunges her ever deeper into a conspiracy. But all of her efforts aren't enough to forestall the outbreak. Agent 57a snuffs out so many millions of lives (including Uni's head) that when the threat finally eases, the global population is approximately the same as it was in 1950. (Not every reader will think this is such a bad outcome.) Elaine, by the way, is one of the lucky survivors.
The hero of THRESHOLD, 27-year-old med student, Jeremy Ross, still has a thing for former girlfriend, Robin Wood. So when she unexpectedly appears in New York, where he is interning, to ask him to help her solve the mystery of her father's death he is more than willing to do so. That her late father was the Secretary of Defense and that he died grotesquely, trying to tear the skin off his own face, only makes the case more tantalizing -- and messy. It takes Jeremy little time to realize that there's been a cover-up involving what appears to be a genetic experiment gone amok. His efforts to get to the truth impel him to join Tucsome, a major, albeit mysterious, genetic institute in South Carolina that has been the beneficiary of $60 billion in covert federal funding. When he gets in too deep he triggers off a cascade of events that plunges him ever deeper into a conspiracy. (Sound familiar?) But not to worry. Even professional hitmen can't put one over on the ever resourceful Jeremy. Implausible from the start, the novel does offer one intriguing plot twist just before the climactic confrontation. Turns out that the plot (in both senses of the word) hinges not on genetic mayhem but on a devilish experiment in eugenics. Look for it soon at your local multiplex.
Much like Jeremy, David Logan, 29, the hero of MAGIC BULLET, goes to work for an institution that specializes in advanced research. In this case, the institute is the prestigious American Cancer Foundation which is a magnet for someone like David whose specialty is breast cancer. Though he is a novice he is still willing to put himself on the line and investigate a controversial drug called Compound J. He finds an ally - and a lover - in a colleague, alluring Sabrina Como. When Compound J fails to work, they dilute the drug and come up with what they term Compound J Lite. It seems to work; malignant tumors shrink dramatically. But their triumph fades quickly when the women they thought they'd cured suddenly begin to fail. The need to find a cure grows ever more desperate when the First Lady is diagnosed with an inoperable tumor that has spread through her body. Logan can't make out why Compound J won't work until he realizes that his experiments have been sabotaged by the man he's been working for. The author, a noted journalist, is more interested in exploring the politics and intrigues of the Foundation than in littering the pages with bodies. Actually, he doesn't get around to killing anyone off by any means other than cancer until close to the end. This is a more ambitious and better written piece of work than the previous three, but hardly original . One has the sneaking suspicion that the author really wanted to write a more serious novel.
The Hartigan Clinic is another one of those places you'd be better off steering clear of. The clinic, where much of the action in THE KINDLING EFFECT takes place, is a facility for the criminally insane. Young psychiatrist, Dr. John Brook, goes to work for Hartigan, even in the face of a rather discouraging precedent, namely the brutal slaying of the man who'd previously occupied his position by one of the inmates. A case can be made that novels like these take their inspiration from Frankenstein; the case can also be made that they are indirectly influenced by Pygmalion. The idea of controlling mind and behavior is probably as old as mankind. How that control can be exercised is what gets novelists up in the morning. As scientists continue to ferret out the secrets of the brain new possibilities of mind control keep suggesting themselves (at least to those of a certain bent.) In Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange," for instance, the criminals were subjected to behaviorist experiments that while succeeding in pacifying them all right, also ended up sapping them of their vitality. In this case, more sophisticated technology (lasers and hormones) are brought to bear in a misguided attempt to change behavior. The results, predictably, are disastrous. The kindling effect occurs when the mind is stimulated to such a combustible point that it basically goes into an epileptic seizure. It is to be avoided if at all possible.
Review by Leslie Alan Horvitz
These New Mystery Book Reviews appeared in Volume IV number 3 of New Mystery Magazine.
