The Policy

by Patrick Lynch

Book Overview

John Grisham meets Robin Cook in Patrick Lynch's timely and terrifying new thriller. After a major corporation takes the giant step into healthcare coverage, one of its high-level executives dies under mysterious circumstances. Now, life insurance actuary Alex Tynan is about to learn that numbers don't lie -- but sometimes, they can kill...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451193261
• ISBN13: 9780451193261
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Ingenious tale of greed and envy

This is really inventive story. It has all the necessary ingredients of a good financial thriller. But the atmosphere, the premise and the subtlety of the message are really exceptional. THE POLICY is an adult thriller in the best sense of that word. It'll hold your attention AND give you plenty to think about.

Atmospheric and highly original tale

Most thrillers these days seem to fall into well-defined categories. As a result the scenarios, premises and even the plots start seeming pretty familiar pretty quickly. For this reason THE POLICY was for me a great treat. The world it sketched was absolutely believable and beatifully sketched, and I never really knew where the story was leading me. Only that things were going to get nastier and more disturbing as they went on. Which they did. A final bonus was that the end actually made me think, the way a real novel is supposed to. I recommend this to any lover of a good, original story.

Patrick Lynch Scores Again

Both Omega and Carriers were absorbing, believable novels, and The Policy is no less effective. The plot is truly ingenious, craftily woven, a marvel of construction which reveals itself incrementally in a riveting manner. No way of second-guessing the outcome! However, Patrick Lynch (a pseudonym for two co-authors) has some difficulty in moulding the characters in his books. One does not quite get a clear image of the participants. Be that as it may, his (their!) three books to date deserve all the acclaim they have mustered, and I await the next book eagerly.

Good story on a scary topic

You get a printout based on a sample of your DNA telling you that you have an inherited disease--even though you have no symptoms now--that will cause you to suffer a slow, agonizing death. Do insurance companies have a right to know this? Do they have the right to test you before issuing a policy? And what happens if this information is manipulated by corrupt people? All these questions are addressed in Patrick Lynch's novel. In this well-told story, we meet the ambitious actuary, Alex, her fast-lane boyfriend, Mark, and her stable mentor, Randal, all of whom play significant roles in answering these questions. The plot is fast-paced, and the characters are quite believeable. This is a great one or two day read--one of those "can't put down" books. Quite enjoyable.