Cook's Book Deserves a Look

Author:  Robin Cook 
Title:  Cure
Publisher:  Putnum

Robin Cook's new novel had a lot of checks against it as I picked the book up to give it a read. Cure is not an intriguing name for a thriller (though it is a great name for a rock band). Cook's one-word naming convention for his books is unhelpfully non-descriptive.

The cover jacket is also vague—it shows a man, presumably a doctor, standing in one, green-lit window, set within a large, darkened building. No action. No drama. Just a solitary MD in night-scopish green. The image on the back cover is of Cook himself, dressed in all black, feet set a shoulder's width apart, hands defiantly at his hips with his elbows spanning the width of the picture, and a smug look on his face that says simply, "So there."

As this is a book with recurring characters from Cook's earlier novels, and I am new to his writing, I was unfamiliar with the staff of New York City's Office of the County Medical Examiner (OCME), uncaring about Laurie Montgomery's emotional state when returning to work after her extended maternity leave, and disinterested to read about a start-up company called iPS USA LLC that was formed to commercialize human induced pluripotent stem cells.

That is until I read the first two sentences.

"It happened in the blink of an eye. One instant everything was fine, considering that Benjamin Corey was breaking into a foreign biological laboratory; the next instant it was a disaster in the making, and Ben Corey went from reasonably relaxed to simply terrified."

I was interested. Cook hooked me. I read on till I hit the back cover.

Instead of mostly focusing on a medical event, as in some of his other novels, Cook blends together a story about the Japanese Mafia (known as the Yakuza), the Italian Mafia in New York City, the staff at OCME, and the iPS biotech company. It could all be really confusing, but Cook helpfully includes a three-page, ‘Key Players' list at the beginning of the book that lists each person's name, their titles, and how they fit in with the story. I flipped to this reference many times in the first half of the book as I got my bearings, especially in learning to differentiate between all the Japanese names.

There is a good mix of medical science (which Cook describes for the novice), the inner workings of the various branches of organized crime, and a story arc that rapidly builds steam over a few short days. Though I wasn't wholly invested in the characters and thought their dialog was somewhat repetitive and shallow, I simply loved the clumsiness of the crooks! Though they try their best to outsmart the medical examiners, there is no cure for their pride or their greed.

Cook takes himself a bit too seriously in the epilogue and begins to preach about the pitfalls of combining big business with medical research patents, as well as the failure of the political system to get health care coverage adequately reformed—but this book wasn't meant to be taken too seriously, no matter how stern the author stares from the back cover.

If you are looking for a very entertaining, well-crafted story, you will enjoy Cure.



**This review first published on September 8, 2010.