Customer Reviews

Mutant

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Peter Clement's Mutant is a medical thriller that is packed with suspense: an activist warning of new DNA strains and environmental problems investigates a powerful company's genetic breakthroughs, and individuals leading disparate lives are drawn together in the survey of genetically modified foods and dangers from bioengineering. An absorbing and highly recommended thriller.

Peter Clement, in his new novel, "Mutant," goes to great pains to explain how dangerous it is to tinker with the genetic makeup of foods, people and animals. Using scientific jargon, Clement explains that once diseases cross species barriers, an illness like the flu can be fatal to millions of people. Even Ebola can theoretically be transmitted by genetically altering the food supply. Not only can accidents occur, but evil scientists have the capability of purposely altering genes in order to harm large numbers of innocent people. This is a serious subject which should receive thoughtful treatment. "Mutant" does not succeed in giving this subject the weight it deserves.

The spunky heroine of this novel is Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, a gorgeous woman with a fiery temper and tremendous intelligence. Her counterpart is Dr. Richard Steele, a troubled ER doctor who gets involved in the anti-bioengineering movement. Both Steele and Sullivan endanger their lives to get to the bottom of an evil scheme to "strike at the heart of America".

What brings this novel down are the cliches that Clement uses in his plot and in his writing. An example is this passage from the novel describing an attack on Dr. Steele by a pair of killer dogs: "He [Dr. Steele] felt locked into their stares, paralyzed by the blood lust he saw burning in their molten pupils and reading in them a hunger as primeval as that of any jungle beast." This is very bad writing.

In addition, Clement relies on one of the biggest cliches of all. It seems that a Middle Eastern madman (who could it be?) wants some deadly bioengineered DNA let loose on a large number of Americans. A mysterious American is helping this madman to achieve his nefarious goal. If you have not figured out who the mastermind of the evil plan is by the halfway point of this book, then you are simply not paying attention.

Other cliches are Dr. Steele's inability to deal with the loss of his wife and the very hackneyed ending, with its "perils of Pauline" pseudo-drama.

Do you want true thrills without the nonsense? Go back to the classic of all time, Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain". When I read this great novel so many years ago, I was truly frightened and educated. The movie was great, too. A few other enjoyable medical thrillers are Michael Palmer's "The Sisterhood" and Tess Gerritsen's "Harvest".

"Mutant" is silly and contrived. I do not recommend it.

This thriller is basically a warning about the dangers of genetic tinkering. In this case, a "genetic vaccine" which is to be inserted into corn by a virus gets out of control; the virus jumps the species barrier. People and animals who eat contaminated corn get sick, and some die from ebola. The amateurs who investigate this situation discover that the main villain is using terrorist tactics to force the American public to address the issue of genetic engineering, particularly the transfer of genetic material from one species to another. The evil one exploits unsuspecting environmentalists to support his plot and causes more than four hundred deaths.

Calling attention to this problem is a worthy goal. However, the paragraphs of technical explanations will go over the heads of most readers. The two main investigators seem unbelievably reckless. While the action scenes are written effectively, the love and sex scenes are unconvincing.

A smart, compelling thriller. I really enjoyed it. Keep them coming, Dr. Clement.

Brad - Canada

What can I say. This book starts off with every Mother's nightmare, a sick child, as you turn each page the child is getting worse, although the mother is a doctor she's a mother first and can only think of getting her son to the hospital, which is many miles away.

As you continue turning the pages you start to wonder if this could really happen! With all the new technology these days, this could happen, and I think that's the most terrifying thought that you'll have as you read this book. Wonderful! Not too technical, great detail, easy to follow, lots of suspense and a great read!

Drs. Steele and Sullivan make a good team, I'm hoping Mr. Clement will write more books with these two characters.

On an isolated highway, a woman cradles her dying son. Though a physician, she can't stop the flow of foamy blood escaping his body. Days later, an autopsy reveals the boy died a disease only found in birds.

At the opposite end of the world, ER doctor Richard Steele suffers a near fatal heart attack, in the middle of his own hospital.

Recovering from his heart attack, Richard is recruited for the examination of hazards on genetically altered foods.

While attending a conference in Hawaii, Richard will become aware of a powerful company using genetic breakthroughs to produce disease-resistant crops, even if they propose a major threat to humans.

From a secret laboratory in New York, to a bloody crime scene in a French cathedral, to a terrifying act at a farm in Hawaii, a plot has been set forth. A plot that could change the world as we know it, for one man knows that altered strains of DNA cannot only change plant life, but also create the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.

`Mutant' had all the makings of a great medical thriller, but then fell flat. Combining to much technical jargon, and too many plot twists, it becomes tiresome and hard to follow. It seems many authors are having a hard time coming up with original plots in this genre, and as many of them try (such as this author), it doesn't always work. Although much of the novel could be plausible, it didn't make for fun reading.

This book does come with a money back guarantee from the publisher, so readers could give this title a try, since they don't have anything to lose, but most medical thriller fans will just wait for new novels from Robin Cook and Michael Palmer.

Nick Gonnella

Ray Bradbury once defined Science Fiction as "a logical extension of reality". In his spell-binding, stand-alone thriller MUTANT, best-selling physician-author Dr. Peter Clement relentlessly takes his readers one horrifyingly-logical step beyond today's scientic realities of laboratory-controlled genetic manipulation into an absolutely plausible and terrifyingly probable consideration of their what-if's should amoral men deliberately set out to unleash cross-specie genetic mutations for purposes of mass destruction. His heroine, Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, a brilliant research geneticist, has become increasingly alarmed by the lack of environmental curbs imposed on multi-billion-dollar corporate enterprises which utilize unmonitored genetic alteration techniques on plants for commercial purposes. Her fears crystalize shortly after the sudden, horrible death of a child in Hawaii has been attributed to a deadly strain of "bird flu", a disease which has somehow passed from its chicken carrier to a human host. After she's almost killed while trying to uncover hard evidence to prove that genetically-tainted feed (which may have originated at Agrenomics International, one of her targeted corporations)was the lethal link, she shares her fears and suspicions with Dr. Richard Steele, a burned-out ER doctor...in recovery from a heart attack brought on by overwork and personal stress...during a chance encounter at a convention and piques both his professional and personal interest. Once he becomes convinced that her fears are entirely justified, they join forces only to discover that whistle-blowing can be deadly business as the appalling, utterly damning evidence begins to emerge from a tangled web of false leads and corporate misdirection. Caught up in what soon proves to be an international terrorist conspiracy, they ultimately find themselves in a race against time to stop the implementation of a doomsday scenario aimed at the heart and heartlands of North America. The cliff-hanger uncertainties of the will-they-won't-they ramifications of its final pages make this brilliant novel's unforgetable denouement a genuine milestone in the genre.

MUTANT quite literally leaps from today's headlines into the heart and mind of its reader. One of Dr. Clement's rare talents as a writer is his ability to make highly technical material completely understandable in lay terms without sacrificing any of the elements of superb storytelling. His characters are solidly-realized and intensely real; he has a positive genius for pushing his plot action to its utmost limits without ever violating our sense of cedibility, and I find it impossible to believe that anyone can come away from this literary experience entirely unshaken or unmoved by his shattering vision of an all-too-possible, near-future America.

The title was too general. Unless one is into intelligent design, everyone on the planet is a Darwinian mutant. Who was this author trying to reach? Perhaps his old medical colleagues. At times it sounded like a textbook on genetics. But Peter should be given three stars for attempting to warn the world about tinkering with and modifying plant genes they don't really understand. However most readers can't digest the periodic table of elements to say nothing of the complexity of naked DNA vaccines, nucleotide sequences, genetic vectors, specie barriers, viruses, host cells and trans-gene expression.

The book read more like a draft than a completed work. I'm sure a good screenwriter could present this book as a good flick on the big screen. The semi-happy ending, where only 400 died instead of 40,000, was definitely Hollywood.

The premise behind this book, genetic engineering and food supplies, promised an interesting read... but sadly I was disappointed in the book. I had to push to finish the book which is unusual. The technical jargon was unnecessary. For a reader with a medical/science background, the definitions after the jargon were distracting. For a reader without a medical/science background, the jargon would be hard to follow. At times I felt like I was reading my virology textbook again esp. with the stuff at the end about the neuraminidase inhibitor as a possible treatment for avian flu. The environmentalist plot line was getting old by the middle of the book. The novel felt like a long flyer/pamphlet full of clichés about the dangers of genetic engineering. The romance between Dr. Steele and Sullivan was also unnecessary. At times the romance was so featured that I felt like I was reading a romance novel... esp. with the explicit details between and Steve. The characters were unrealistic in their zeal to uncover this "mastermind" terror plot to use engineered crops as a weapon. The focus on Dr. Sullivan's doubts about her protégé was troubling as well. She doubted the integrity of Azrhan because he spoke Farsi. I found this offensive. Overall the book was, in my opinion, one of the worst medical thrillers I've read in a long time. The writting style was horrible. Even the science behind it was weak with Kathleen crying wolf about vectors every couple of pages. If you want a good medical thriller I would recommend Robin Cook.... His books remain the most interesting to read and the medical terms are kept to a minimum so that the majority of readers will not need a medical dictionary to understand what is going on.

While I know little about the biology-side of existance, I felt that the Clement did an excellent job creating an air of realism and gave life to the possibilities he presented. All science fiction is about possibilities based on current science and technology.

I could not put this book down and read the last 200 pages in one weekend. As a person concerned with my health and what I eat, this book made me wonder just what I'm buying in the grocery store.

On top of that, Clement kept me guessing and changing my mind as to who the real mastermind behind the great conspiracy was. It was definitely worth my time and money.