By hook or by cook…. Robin gets another book!!😀….. Charlatan by Robin Cook….
Medical novels are close to me for obvious reasons and only a doctor can ever get this right. Don’t get me wrong since I have thoroughly enjoyed Arthur Hailey’s final diagnosis or even Eric Seagal’s Doctor. Both were very close but still there was something missing. Cook’s novels though not that literally great still feels close because he has felt the experience. Like how in the current novel he describes the pre operative and operative incidents. There’s a certain amount of knowledge​ and the fact that you have experienced it first hand which is very important.
You can see this in novels written even by Micaheal Crichton who was a doctor by profession or even A J Cronin’s works (the author of Hatter’s castle and doctor Zivago)… The latest was Paul Kalnithy when breath becomes air which was more of a human side of a doctor….
The first novel I had read and the most famous was the Coma which was interesting and I followed it up with the year of the intern which was another good depiction of the internal musings of what happens in those four walls of the hospital and operation theatre….
But at the end of it all Cook has a pattern, first it was some crazy nut job intent on killing the terminally ill or the villain at the end of the story is always the other girl! Or like his last few novels everyone dies!…. In one novel he even went the Dan Brown way and treated Neuroblastoma with miracle!…. There was one novel about alien invasion and another about India to add to variety though the basic premise remains the same…!!
Though to be fair he keeps updated with the latest in the field of medicine. Be it concierge practice or the latest iPhone app which decides to kill terminally ill or nanotechnology​ or even taking on the quacks …… All in the previous novel though and not in this one though….
Here he gives us an insight into the amount of knowledge available in the net and how this can be used to even practice !….. Not giving much here but it was an eye opener in many ways. How important is the social media has been dealt here with a Gray’s Anatomy style of narrative…… Though at the end of it all it’s all money and politics…..
Read it in between the very heavy on the grey matter Homo Deus!(which is still only halfway done!!)…..
Light Reading medical thriller is what this is…….. Try it if that’s what you want!
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