Crisis

by Robin Cook

Book Overview

Dr. Robin Cook, the inventor of the medical thriller--and bestselling author of Coma, Abduction, Invasion, Marker, and many other chilling novels--now shows readers a healer's dark side, in the terrifying story of a doctor who plunges into a web of corruption and lies.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399153578
• ISBN13: 9780399153570
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
• Length: 468 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Robin Cook at his usual best!

This is another great Robin Cook novel! It is not of the "Jack and Laurie" series, but it is still one of his best books. Mixed with both medical drama as well as courtroom drama, this book is sure to please whether you love to read medical fiction or law fiction! Really liked the ending to this one. It was not what I expected and I usually know how a book is going to end long before it's finished. Happy Reading! :)

Crisis is fun and educating reading

I haven't read Robin Cook since Coma, but this was a fine reading experience which prompted a conversation with my husband about concierge medicine and the causes for it and its dark side. I haven't been reading fiction lately so was pleasantly surprised when I chose this book and enjoyed every page of it. I did not think it was "wordy". I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes to learn something real from a work of fiction.

Crisis

Robin Cook's been known for his good writing for years, but with this novel, he really hits home. The thoughts of medical liabilities and lawsuits has been a worrisome item for any physician or dentist (as well as others on the healing business) for years. Cook tells it like it is.

Thriller!

Doctors and lawyers are not usually the best of buds. When a Boston area internist, living high on hog practicing "concierge medicine" with annual retainers for personalized service loses a patient to an apparent heart attack, the last thing he expects is a malpractice suit. Forced by circumstances to move out of the apartment he shares with his 23 year old girl friend and back into the martial home with his psychologist wife and three daughters, Craig Bowman seems defeated. So defeated in fact that his beautiful and forgiving wife calls her brother a medical examiner in New York City to come to Boston and watch the trial. Stapleton secures permission to exhume to body of Bowman's patient for autopsy and immediately confronts threats to his and his sister's family's lives. Working against the clock Stapleton finds that things are not what they seem on many levels. Complicating matters for Stapleton is the strange behavior of his brother-in-law who begins his testimony in full attack mode against the plaintiff's lawyer and then transfers his animus to the jury whom he assures are not his peers, and have not right to sit in judgment of him since none of them were physicians. Michael Connelly contends, without claim of originality, that all good genre fiction must be about some "big picture" issue. At first I thought Robin Cook was going to serve up the plaintiff's trial bar, but his brush paints with broader strokes than traditional medical-legal antagonism. At the end, the old admonition "Physicians, heal thyself" seems as good a big issue as any.

excellent thriller

Estranged from his wife and living in Boston with his lover, Dr. Craig Bowman is happy because he is making a lot of money and is enjoying spending it.. Craig gets a call from the husband of patient Patience Stanhope who claims his wife is really ill. Although Craig thinks it is another false alarm he goes over there and sees she is having a cardiac episode. By the time the ambulance gets them to the hospital, she is dead. Some time later Craig is served with papers accusing him of malpractice. On the advice of his attorney he moves in back with his wife but he is his own worst witness losing his temper during pre-trial testimony. His wife Alexis calls her brother Jack, a New York medical examiner, and asks him to help them. Jack suggests they exhume the body and do an autopsy. The assistant to Mr. Stanhope's lawyer beats Jack up and someone breaks into the Bowman house, ties up their three girls and tells them to tell their parents not to have an autopsy performed. Alexis tells Jack to do it in the hopes of exonerating her husband. Jack agrees to do it but the trial is coming to a close and he has to get back to New York to get married. CRISIS is another excellent thriller by Robin Cook and this time it is as much a legal thriller as it is a medical mystery. One of the reasons Mr. Cook is so popular is that he makes the medical scenes easy to understand. Jack is the hero of the book as he is the one who takes action and gets punched out by the goons. The ending will come as a shock to the audience because the truth is so stunning yet believable. This is another Cook New York Times bestseller. Harriet Klausner