Robin Cook Mystery Collection

Robin Cook Novels

Shock by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
Robin Cook, master of bestselling medical thrillers, answers the "What's the worst thing that could happen?" question in this plot-twisting novel in which villains with no sense of ethics or social responsibility get their greedy hands on the newest cloning technology. It starts when a couple of Harvard graduate students answer the Wingate Clinic's ad for egg donors. The women figure on financing a year in Venice and the down payment on a Boston condo with the extraordinary sum they're promised. But a year later, the heroines feel the emotional need to seek out the children they've made possible for infertile couples. So they disguise themselves and seek jobs at the clinic in order to access the identifying information. The clinic, as it turns out, has plenty of secrets to protect, so it's hard to believe that a pair of computer neophytes could bypass its security. But they do, and the author is an adept enough writer to finesse this detail.
As in past books, Cook is much better at the technical details of medical research than he is at characterization, but he definitely knows how to plot a thriller. This one keeps you turning the pages until the final denouement, though the last chapter ends abruptly, leaving the reader to wonder whether he ran out of steam or is just setting up a sequel in which he'll recycle the villains in a new scheme with a new pair of victims.

Sphinx by Robin Cook

The bestselling master of medical suspense Robin Cook mines the mysteries of Egypt's magnificent past to deliver a one-of-a-kind thriller packed with compelling realism and unrelenting suspense.

Toxin by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
Just when you thought it was safe to eat a hamburger again, Robin Cook--master of medical mysteries, deadly epidemics, and creepy comas--returns with an all too likely villain drawn right from current headlines: the American meat industry. If you've ever wondered where the E. coli bacteria comes from, and exactly how it can ravage the human body, destroying everything in its path, this is the book for you. As usual, Cook delivers solid information, well-researched medical arcana, and a scathing indictment of managed health care.
His protagonist, Kim Regis, is an all-too-typical ego-driven surgeon, whose arrogance and invulnerability set him up to be brought low by the deadly toxin that takes the life of his young daughter. Sparing no time and barely a paragraph to reflect on his loss, Regis goes right after the culprit, a meat-packing behemoth that brings dead and diseased animals to the slaughterhouse, breaking every health regulation in the book. The scenes set on the killing floor and in the boning rooms will make a vegetarian out of the most confirmed red-meat eater. Toxin is a heart-pounding thriller that hits very close to home.

Chromosome 6 by Robin Cook

One missing organ. One genetic breakthrough. One medical conspiracy too terrifying to imagine. In his most prophetic thriller yet, Robin Cook challenges the medical ethics of genetic manipulations and cloning. In the jungles of equatorial Africa, a biotechnology giant has taken transplant surgery and animal research to a new level. Where one mistake could bridge the evolutionary gap between man and ape--and forever change the genetic map of our existence.

Coma by Robin Cook

The book that put Cook on the bestseller lists, Coma is the gripping story of patients who check into a hospital for "minor" surgery-and never wake up again...

Fatal Cure by Robin Cook

Leaving their urban hospital for a modern medical facility in Bartlet, Vermont, doctors Angela and David Wilson begin to notice puzzling details about the deaths of several terminal patients, in a chilling study of the nightmarish implications of managed health care carried to an extreme.

Godplayer by Robin Cook

There have always been many ways to die. But now, in an ultra-modern hospital, there was a new one . . . the most horrifying one of all.

Abduction by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
Perry Berg is president of Benthic Marine and a passenger aboard The Benthic Explorer, a 450-foot research ship endeavoring to drill into, and sample for the first time, the earth's magma core. Also onboard are the lovely Dr. Suzanne Newell; ex-navy commander and present submersible skipper Donald Fuller; and navy-cum-Neanderthal divers Richard Adams and Michael Donaghue. It is this cast of characters who, with the reluctant Perry, dive to the stilled drill site in order to make repairs. En route, they are sucked (or suckered) into a defunct undersea volcano and deposited into an otherworldly wonderland. That takes about 75 pages of fairly cogent spadework. The next 375 pages sprout some of the looniest, most derivative, made-for-TV-movie science fiction imaginable. Our heroes, you see, have been abducted to Interterra, an undersea world of staggering beauty and unheard of technologies--intergalactic travel and eternal life, for starters--populated by stunningly beautiful, toga-wearing, first-generation humans.
First-generation? They were here first, see, and had been doing very nicely until their scientists realized that the earth was about to be "showered with planetesimal collisions, just as had happened in its primordial state," and that they had better start digging. While the Interterrans prospered and thrived undersea, we, the second generation, began hauling our single-celled bodies up by our ooze-straps and started all over again.

And that's about it. People with names like Arak and Sufa speak strangely, giggle at the primitive second-generationists, recoil at the very thought of violence, press their palms together to have sex, and direct "worker clones" to do the dishes while the second generation does its stereotypical best to, in turns, exemplify, define, and defile humankind.

If you've yet to read Robin Cook's innumerable (and mostly successful) medical thrillers, start now. If you want to read about an alternative world, start off right with H.G. Wells's 1895 masterpiece, The Time Machine.

Mutation by Robin Cook

On the forefront of a new breakthrough in surrogate parenting and genetic research, a brilliant doctor seeks to create the son of his dreams and invents a living nightmare instead.

Vital Signs by Robin Cook

Here is Robin Cook's most controversial medical thriller-the shocking story of experimental fertilization, the passion to create life, and the power to destroy it.

Blindsight by Robin Cook

In another terrifying medical thriller, when the demand for organ transplants far exceeds the supply, a group of ruthless people go to unorthodox and deadly lengths to find donors.

Acceptable Risk by Robin Cook

Robin Cook confronts one of the most provocative issues of our time--a terrifying glimpse into the dangers of antidepressant drugs...

Fever by Robin Cook

Charles Martel is a brilliant cancer researcher who discovers that his own daughter is the victim of leukemia. The cause: a chemical plant conspiracy that not only promises to kill her, but will destroy him as a doctor and a man if he tries to fight it...

Mindbend by Robin Cook

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...

Outbreak by Robin Cook

Murder and intrigue reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country. Dr. Marissa Blumenthal of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control investigates--and soon uncovers the medical world's deadliest secret....

Mortal Fear by Robin Cook

At a large Boston clinic, a world-class biologist stumbles upon a major scientific breakthrough. Soon, healthy, middle-aged patients are dying of old age. And the ultimate experiment in terror begins...

Harmful Intent by Robin Cook

Robin Cook's explosive novel of a doctor accused of malpractice-a fugitive on the run who pierces the heart of a shocking medical conspiracy.

Invasion by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
Fans of Robin Cook's many thrillers will be happy to know another one is on the way. 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.

Contagion by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
When not one but three different extremely rare diseases kill several patients at a New York hospital, forensic pathologist Jack Stapleton suspects it's more than just coincidence. He thinks there's a connection between the appearance of the mysterious microbes responsible for the deaths and the HMO that owns the hospital--the same HMO that once destroyed his flourishing medical practice. Is Americare deliberately killing off its sickest patients--those who cost the most money to treat? Or is there an even more sinister motive behind the strange goings-on at Manhattan General, not to mention the attempts on Jack's life? And what is beautiful Terese Hagen, the hard-driving creative director of a Madison Avenue ad agency, doing in the middle of this slightly muddled, but still engrossing, tale of greed, medicine, and mayhem? Like Michael Crichton, whose Andromeda Strain remains the classic in the genre, Cook is sometimes heavy-handed when it comes to character development, and his fulminations about the dangers of managed care often get in the way of the plot. Still, Contagion will make you think twice about taking your next case of flu to the ER instead of your own bed.

Vector by Robin Cook

Amazon.com
Robin Cook's latest plot--the threat of an anthrax virus turned loose in a New York government building and in Central Park--is ripped straight from the headlines, and as such it may be charitably described as having a certain lumpish quality in the prose and an overabundance of cuteness in the lead characters.
Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery, the dueling forensic pathologists who bounced off each other in Cook's Chromosome 6, collide and combine once again as a mad Russian cabdriver, who used to work in a Moscow bioweapons factory, comes up with a plan to punish America for not welcoming him with open arms. The cabby forms an unlikely alliance with two firemen who happen to be white supremacists; they fund his anthrax research to further their own lunatic schemes.

Cook is, as ever, best at creating scenes of perfectly realized medical terror which plug into the paranoia of the moment. But if you want deep characters and sensitive description, read Fay Weldon.

Brain by Robin Cook

Two doctors suspect something is very wrong at the enormous medical center where they work. And soon they will put their careers--and their lives--in deadly jeopardy, as they penetrate the eerie inner sanctums of a medical world gone mad.

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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