Customer Reviews

Flawless

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm not usually a fan of medical thrillers, but gave Joshua Spanogle's Isolation Ward a try and was glad I did. This guy can write! Hero Nate McCormick is a great flawed protagonist with a unique voice and someone who is easy to identify with. In Flawless, McCormick is back and Spanogle has managed to avoid the sophomore curse, returning with a novel just as good (if not better) than his first.

Nate has relocated to the West Coast to pursue a relationship with the girlfriend he reconnected with during his initial case (chronicled in Ward). He's jobless and hasn't found an apartment and his aimless state has started to wear on the burgeoning relationship. Into this state of things comes an old friend from his student days who wants Nate's help with something. But before Nate can find out what it is, his friend Murph is murdered, along with his wife and two children, plunging Nate into a complicated mystery swirling around a biotech company in the South San Francisco hills, coupled with Chinese gangsters and a series of photographs of women and men, faces disfigured by an agressive facial cancer.

Nate is warned off, his girlfriend is attacked, and several of the people in the photographs are killed in a variety of shocking ways, but McCormick just can't give up, feeling he owes something to the friend he lost track of. This is an excellent, fast-moving novel with three-dimensional, believable characters. Nate suffers for his investigation and his feelings of rage and helplessness are palpable. And his life continues to develop on the sidelines, in the manner of the best current detective fiction. Spanogle is a truly talented writer and I'm very much looking forward to his next novel. Flawless is very highly recommended!

I purchased this off-the-shelf because Booklist on the cover promised it "Could give Michael Chricton a run for his money. Skilled storytelling" and because it sounded like a unique concept - "Perfect patients, perfect victims, a medical nightmare come true".

With a likeable, but flawed main character who uses humor to offset stress, page-turning action, a host of REALLY, REALLY bad guys and bureaucratically challenged government agents, there's no doubt that the "Skilled storytelling." part is true.

There are a few flaws that keep this book for me from being more than just a slightly above average, fun page-turner.

1. Over the top characters and action - it's fun to read over-the-top sometimes, but while I liked and despised appropriate characters I never really cared when something good or bad happened to any of them.

2. The cover and title of the book (not to mention the blurb on the back) gives away what it takes Nate our hero - 289 pages to figure out. Fortunately, enough page-turning action and a sense of how you don't really know how it will all play out keeps you reading up to that point. It would be better if you didn't know exactly what every clue meant, so long before him.

3. Big over-the-top ending. It's a pet peeve of mine lately - how decent thrillers turn into cartoonish VERY, VERY BAD GUYS against GOOD GUY with impossible odds doing things that stretch far, far beyond the believable.

Bottom Line: Spanogle weaves a decent tale that will keep you turning the pages. He's not the next Micheal Chricton, though. He's more like the next Robin Cook - with his fun, over-the-top medical thrillers. And, if you like Robin Cook medical thrillers, the more you're bound to like this one - it's right up there with many of his.

If you want a voice performer who can deliver terse, edgy lines that keep you listening and can sustain suspense with well chosen pauses, look for Scott Brick's name on an audio book. That's not news as he seems to be sought after by almost every audio publisher, and has been named Narrator of the Year. His take on protagonist Nate McCormick is perfection as Nate sometimes spouts off unwisely or verbally flagellates himself because he can't put the pieces of this crime/medical puzzle together fast enough.

Once a detective for the Centers for Disease Control, Nate has decided to turn his life around with a new job, new location and, of course, the beautiful Brooke. But, at the outset there's trouble beginning with a a heated argument then the murder of an old friend and the discovery of shocking photographs - pictures of the horribly disfigured, women with their faces covered with tumors. As if this suffering were not enough, it soon becomes obvious that these same women are being murdered in an effort to cover up the devastating effects of a cosmetic drug.

We learned with Isolation Ward that medical student Joshua Spanogle knows his territory well, and he mines it again with chilling results in this story of the havoc wrought when organized crime and medicine partner.

- Gail Cooke

I read his previous book, and was a little annoyed by the main character's persona, but "Nate" and every other part of the book was very much improved. Easily the best book I have read this year. Deep and well developed... more believable and not a plot that you can figure out quickly.

I highly recommend the audiobook on CD or at [...]... Scott Brick really brings this book to life.

I had a bit of trouble getting through Isolation Ward, but I did enjoy it. I found Flawless to be a better written book. I will be anxious for the third book to see if it is less wordy and tighter. Good reads.

Joshua Spanogle's 2nd novel featuring Dr. Nathaniel McCormick is a great read, though overlong in spots. In this outing McCormick has relocated to San Francisco to be closer to his girlfriend, but has become professionally adrift. Through a chance meeting with an old colleague McCormick is drawn into a conspiracy to cover-up an outbreak of cancers, and McCormick has to negotiate the goings-on behind the scences to uncover the source of the mutations. Punctuated frequently with humor and violence, the story takes us along on McCormick's journey.

Well done, but could have used one more round with an editor.

This book falls into the category of the page-turner....one you won't want to put down until you reach the end. The author keeps the reader on the edge of his or her seat, just as with his first medical novel, leaving one anxious for the printing of his 3rd. Despite, I am sure, some poetic license taken with the possible vs impossible, for those of us who are fans of medical mystery novels, I highly recommend this one.

Spanogle has written another wonderful book. I love the main character's personality and his humor. A great read. I hope there is another book in the near future.

Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box" has a line, "I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black." The song could easily be on the soundtrack for Flawless, a smart, lyrical, tremendously entertaining, hard-to-second guess novel by a gifted writer who really makes it all feel effortless. The dark, wry tone perfectly colors the novel's protagonist, who is brilliant, outside the law, morally relativistic, both sober and drunk, and quite flawed, if you will. His immersion into an extraordinarily well-drawn world of technology, moneyed medicine, and the seductive pulchritude of the San Francisco Bay area is a potent concoction, and I enjoyed every turn of the flawless page. Spanogle's plotting and character development are spot-on as is the novel's inevitable descent into a brutal underbelly of beauty. It's a fine thriller, and have heard Michael Crichton mentioned as a comparison, which is valid, but there's a spirit of Dostoevsky in Spanogle's words, and despite the bleak wit, a surprisingly tender heart.

I've read "Isolation Ward" and will say "Flawless" is tighter, tougher and more topical. It's like a Chandler-horror version of Nip/Tuck. What I liked most about Spanogle's style is that, like Crichton, you feel like you're learning something along the way -- it's not a complete police procedural, and there's surprising heart. A beautiful female newscaster ends up with a decaying face and the scene between Nate and her has genuinely stayed with me. Plus, this time round, Nate (who has enough dings in his character to make him human) gets out of the biotech scene more and into San Francisco, which I liked. Spanogle is bent on not boring you and I appreciate that.