Customer Reviews

Patent to Kill

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I really loved this book and can't wait to read the rest of Christofferson's books. It opened my eyes to a lot of new ideas and really conveyed the atmosphere and ambience of the Amazon rainforest. Terrific story! I could not put it down, literally, and it cost me some bleary mornings.

April Christofferson's new thriller, "Patent to Kill," is about the evils of biopiracy. Ruthless drug and biotechnology companies are sending people deep into the Amazon rain forest to find folk medicines and curative herbs. They even take blood samples of isolated tribes to use their DNA for new therapies. Invariably, the tribes are harmed by this exposure to foreigners, and they are inadequately compensated for this intrusion into their private world.

The beautiful and troubled Asahel Sullivan works for her father, Philip Esser, founder and CEO of Mercy Pharmaceuticals. Asahel hates her father and everything that he stands for. In the past, she was an activist who protested the exploitation of native tribes, and although she works for her father, her heart is not in her job. Asahel is horrified at her father's relentless pursuit of profits.

Jake Skully is a doctor and recent widower who works for a rival biotech company called GenChrom. Jake and Asahel meet in the Amazon, and they join forces to get to the bottom of a terrible conspiracy which threatens the lives of many innocent people.

Through her characters, April Christofferson repeatedly lectures her readers on the evils of exploiting indigenous tribes. The villains in "Patent to Kill" are caricatures whom the author depicts without a hint of subtlety. Jake and Asahel are attractive protagonists, but they cannot save "Patent to Kill" from being a run-of-the-mill thriller about nasty biotechnology executives who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

This book was pushy and preachy about the author's obvious hatred for her former profession. While I'm not a fan of the biotech industry, I don't like being railed at in the books I read for fun.

Patent to Kill was pretty much a soap opera set to the Brazilian jungle. There were enough affairs, violent encounters, family secrets, and other bits of schmaltzy melodrama to keep the biggest fans of Young and the Restless satisfied. For me it detracted from what I thought was going to be the plot. Jake was too wishy-washy to make a good hero and Asahel was so blinded by her emotions that she faltered too. The bad guys were laughably bad.

Oddly enough, the pace of this book is good enough that you don't really realize what a stinker you've read until you're about 9/10 of the way through, so this author does something right.

It talks about medicine... Not really.

Is a thriller... I don't think so.

It has a good love story... Not at all

So why waste time with this book?

This has to be one of the worst books I've ever read! I do like medical thrillers and picked up Patent to Kill by April Christofferson. Its jacket indicated that it deals with biopiracy, a "new" crime where pharmaceutical companies go into remote villages where the populations are "pure" to draw blood for DNA research. I'm sure that there will now be lots of other books that come out with the same subject matter.

Anyway, in this one, a woman escapes the slaughter in her village in the Amazon, and, clad in native dress, with no passport, speaking no English, and using uncut diamonds as currency, makes her way to Seattle! As if that is not remarkable enough, she then makes her way back home!

But, even more than that, what I could not believe was that the author had three- count 'em THREE- characters named Michael! I actually finished the book only because I wanted to see if she ever explained why she could not think up a different name! Unbelievable!

Once the Scullys were a happy family of four, the parents practicing medicine in Nogales when tragedy struck. The son went blind from what Jake believes is an environmental factor. Subsequently, the police find the dead wife's body and rule it a suicide. Jake believes she was murdered. Jake moves his family to Seattle and goes to work for GenChrom.

Research shows that Jake's son's blindness is caused by damage to the G31 gene but the mutated G32 gene (as proven in experiments with dogs) if injected into damaged DNA material will allow his son to see. The only problem is finding the G32 gene and to do that Jake and his employer must travel to the Amazon rain forest and locate a blue-eyed tribe that might have the gene in their DNA. The trip is an eye opener to Jake as he sees what happens to the native populations when ruthless corporate types who not only bend the laws but also break them, approach them. Jake's ethic's places he and his family in danger from a person who sees people as disposable commodities.

PATENT TO KILL is a fascinating medical thriller on a par with the works of Robin Cook. Readers experience the beauty and danger of the Amazon jungle in counterpoint to corporate America's thirst for money treating bio-piracy as if they were committing a trifling offense, that is when they even care. April Christofferson keeps the reader interested by never letting up on the action but also creating a moral hero, one who is it is easy to care about though he to easily resolves his dilemma of his son's need and the tribal situation.

Harriet Klausner