Amazon.com Review
The Patient, Michael Palmer's ninth medical suspense novel, is a fast-paced beat-the-clock thriller. Someone is killing off the world's most gifted neurosurgeons, and Alex Bishop, a renegade CIA agent, thinks he knows who it is. Bishop is out to settle his score with Claude Malloche, an international assassin responsible for the death of Bishop's brother. When he learns that Malloche is afflicted with an inoperable brain tumor, Bishop understands why the murdered neurosurgeons died, and where Malloche will strike next. Meanwhile, Jessie Copeland, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer and neurosurgeon, is working to perfect a robotic device that will revolutionize brain surgery.
One of the patients awaiting surgery at Boston's Eastern Massachusetts Medical Center is Malloche--but which one? No one has ever been able to identify the assassin, and Jessie is hardly well known enough to attract his notice. But ARTIE, the robotic device, is--and Malloche will stop at nothing to ensure that it's used to save his own life. He threatens to release a deadly nerve toxin on thousands of innocent people, and Jessie is forced to save him at the cost of her own safety.
Notable for his swift pacing, well-drawn minor as well as major characters, and medical expertise, Palmer delivers the goods with this heart-stopping read. -- Jane Adams
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Palmer's ninth medical thriller (after Miracle Cure) probably isn't the book to be reading when you've got a slight headache. Early on, a star Olympic gymnast feels a small pain in her skull, and soon she's having a brain tumor zapped by a flashy new surgical robot. The author, who was a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine for 20 years, tells readers so much about the actual work of brain surgery that some might decide to skip over a few of the more agonizing moments, such as the frenzied operation on a young boy with a bullet wound. Yet these bloody and painful details put readers firmly inside the skin of Dr. Jessie Copeland, a neurosurgeon in her 40s with a combined undergraduate degree in biology and mechanical engineering. Now working under egomaniacal chief surgeon Carl Gilbride at a top Boston hospital, Jessie gets to try out ARTIE (Assisted Robotic Tissue Incision and Extraction) on cadavers, while Gilbride coaxes foundations to cough up millions for the revolutionary new procedure. Attracted by the media attention generated by ARTIE's use (too early, Jessie thinks) on the gymnast, shadowy terrorist Claude Malloche, known as "the Mist," who also has a brain tumor, comes to the hospital for treatmentAand winds up holding patients and staff hostage in case the operation fails. It's finally up to Jessie and a rogue CIA agent to keep everyone healthy. This graft between medical and terrorist thriller has some rough edges, but the operation is a success. Agent, Jane Rotrosen Agency.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
