The Procedure [Mass Market Paperback]

Peter Clement (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 29, 2001

"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement's first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again--combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.

With authentic detail and a surgeon's precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine, one threat is more dangerous than contagion: the threat of human beings deciding who should live and who should die. . . .

Death is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence at St. Vincent's Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Now, in his pressure cooker career, Dr. Earl Garnet has broken the cardinal rule of modern medicine: he publicly blames a powerful HMO for practicing "no-fault murder" in the death of an eighteen-month-old baby. The HMO swiftly strikes back, igniting a debilitating boycott of the hospital. But after several accidents nearly cost patients their lives, the true bloodletting begins. A doctor is found sprawled out in the parking lot, his throat cut ear to ear.

Blamed for instigating the chaos, Earl Garnet knows that he faces more than a deadly power play. The doctor may have uncovered a conspiracy reaching from the halls of one of the nation's most influential HMOs to a small, experimental clinic in Mexico, where yet another of his patients went for treatment and disappeared. To find answers, Garnet must wade deep into the murky, surreal workings of today's health care industry.

Smart, tough, crackling with suspense, and vivid in its hospital setting, this visionary novel instantly places Peter Clement in the distinguished company of Michael Palmer and Robin Cook. Make no mistake: The Procedure is the work of a first-rate physician and an absolutely brilliant storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement's first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again--combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.

With authentic detail and a surgeon's precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine, one threat is more dangerous than contagion: the threat of human beings deciding who should live and who should die. . . .

Death is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence at St. Vincent's Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Now, in his pressure cooker career, Dr. Earl Garnet has broken the cardinal rule of modern medicine: he publicly blames a powerful HMO for practicing "no-fault murder" in the death of an eighteen-month-old baby. The HMO swiftly strikes back, igniting a debilitating boycott of the hospital. But after several accidents nearly cost patients their lives, the true bloodletting begins. A doctor is found sprawled out in the parking lot, his throat cut ear to ear.

Blamed for instigating the chaos, Earl Garnet knows that he faces more than a deadly power play. The doctor may have uncovered a conspiracy reaching from the halls of one of the nation's most influential HMOs to a small, experimental clinic in Mexico, where yet another of his patients went for treatment and disappeared. To find answers, Garnet must wade deep into the murky, surreal workings of today's health care industry.

Smart, tough, crackling with suspense, and vivid in its hospital setting, this visionary novel instantly places Peter Clement in the distinguished company of Michael Palmer and Robin Cook. Make no mistake: The Procedure is the work of a first-rate physician and an absolutely brilliant storyteller.

About the Author

Peter Clement, M.D., is a physician who headed an emergency room at a major metropolitan hospital and now maintains a private practice. He is also the author of Lethal Practice and Death Rounds. He is married to a physician and has two sons.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Fawcett; First Edition edition (May 29, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449006220
• ISBN-13: 978-0449006221
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,546,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Murder and Malfeasance Make for Deadly Medicine, July 17, 2001

By 

Eleanor V. Miller (Henderson, NV United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Procedure (Mass Market Paperback)

Peter Clement's charismatic hero, Dr. Earl Garnet, outspoken chief of ER services at St. Paul's Hospital in Buffalo, has always been something of a maverick. Deeply caring and utterly involved in his profession, he puts his patients before what's politic and his professional ethics before personal advancement. His infinite capacity for outrage in both areas is tested to the hilt when a baby arrives too late and dies in his ER because the mother's HMO had withheld not timely treatment, but their guarantee to pay for it. He subsequently publicly charges powerful Brama Health Care with "No fault murder" and opens a can of worms that rocks the hospital's hierarchy to its core. Dr. Clement's own years of experience and technical expertise in ER medicine coupled with his brilliant flair for suspenseful plotting and and non-stop action make this latest addition to an already best-selling medical series almost impossible to put down. As has been the case with his two previous thrillers, he keeps several plot-lines running in tandem. Shortly after the baby's death, a doctor who might have been associated with Brama is found brutally murdered in the hospital parking lot, and another doctor, an alcoholic friend and former colleague of Garnet's, disappears after enrolling in a secret, experimental drug rehab program which also appears to be linked to the HMO. As the financial stakes increase and pressures to cover-up and deny mount, Garnet finds himself increasingly alone in his attempts to establish a connection between these apparently disparate events that will provide tangible proof of murder, malfeasance and corruption in both the HMO and the medical establishment, bring the real culprits to justice and create the desperately needed mandate for managed care reform which he sees as a personal imperative. In order to do this, he ultimately puts his own life on the line with utterly spine-tingling results.

I believe that Dr. Clement is a 'muck-raker' in the original and most honorable sense of the term. He wields his creative talent like a scapel with devastating power and accuracy to expose the multiplicity of flaws and shortcomings inherent to our present system of medical care, and it is impossible to come away from his fictional world without having some terrible concerns about the real one which we all have to deal with sooner or later ourselves.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A young doctor tries to bring down a villainous HMO., October 3, 2001

By 

E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Procedure (Mass Market Paperback)

What would authors of medical thrillers do without HMO's? In dozens of medical thrillers, the administrators of HMO's and the physicians belonging to them either withhold vital care, engage in ghoulish experimentation, or actively kill their patients in order to reap greater profits.

In Peter Clement's "The Procedure," the hero is Earl Garnet, Chief of the Emergency Room in St. Paul's Hospital, located in Buffalo, N. Y. Garnet is enraged at an HMO called Brama, which has engaged in a deliberate campaign to discourage patients from going to the hospital. The officials at Brama let their patients know that if their ailments turn out to be minor, then the patients themselves will be solely responsible for their hospital bills. Unfortunately, a number of patients die because they delay going to the hospital until their conditions became too serious to ignore. Garnet angrily calls Brama's tactics "no-fault murder".

The HMO decides to boycott St. Paul's in order to punish Garnet, and his fellow physicians are annoyed with him. However, all this takes a back seat to a series of brutal murders that occur on the grounds of St. Paul's. Someone is slashing physicians' throats and the police do not have a clue who the murderer is or what his motive may be.

Gradually, Garnet and Riley, a policeman assigned to the case, realize that the murders are somehow tied to the Brama HMO and to a shadowy facility that Brama runs in Mexico to treat hard-core alcoholics. Garnet risks his life to uncover the truth about Brama and to bring the HMO to its knees.

Clement is very good at describing medical procedures. The scenes that take place in the operating room and in the emergency room are authentic and exciting. His indictment of HMO's, while not a new theme in medical thrillers, does hit home.

However, the characters are the same old tired stereotypes. Garnet is the intrepid hero who is unafraid to go into the lion's den to uncover the truth. He has an equally heroic friend named Jack who also is willing to give up his life to defeat the HMO's. The bad guys practically twirl their mustaches as they perform their villainous deeds. The identity of the killer is obvious long before the end of the book, yet the author springs it upon us at the end as if it is a big surprise.

I give "The Procedure" high marks for the author's medical know-how, but low marks for the contrived plot and the stereotyped characters.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting Page Turner, December 1, 2002

By 

Connie Showers (Verdun, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Procedure (Mass Market Paperback)

I really enjoyed this book and am glad that there are no HMO's in Quebec. As exciting as the previous ones, couldn't put it down. Dr. Garnett is like a hound following a scent, he never lets up. I anxiously await the next round with Dr. Garnett et al.