Customer Reviews

Silent Treatment

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have just finished reading Michael Palmer's Silent Treatment and there's all but one word to say: Wow! A well-knit plot, engaging characters, action, suspense, all these ingredients make this novel a captivating book. It was hard to put down and a real pleasure to read night after night.

This is the first of Michael Palmer's books that I have read. It was interesting enough to keep me reading. I finished it in no time flat, but it was not captivating. It lacked real excitement and ended too abruptly. I never connected with Harry, and at times I wished Dickenson would just arrest him and get it over with. As a graduate student in Health Administration I was excited but disgusted by the whole managed care sub-plot. Wow. That took a creative imagination.

I made the mistake of reading one of Michael Palmer's previous books, "The Sisterhood", right after reading this book. While both books are excellent, many parts of the stories were interchangable. A doctor wrongly charged with murder. A high power group trying to frame him. A fight over alcohol abuse.

Mr. Palmer builds his stories well. He gets you in the middle of five or six story lines, and brings them all together by the end of the book.

Michael Palmer has really done it this time. Such excitement,thrill, suspense, and frightening reality, as he breaks open the mythof the managed care system in the United States! Every person in or considering the managed care plan, MUST read this book.

Ellen Siepser, M.D.

Just before his 50th birthday, life begins to unravel for Dr. Harry Corbett of the Manhattan Medical Center.

He believes he will die on his 50th birthday (family history), and his talented wife, Evie, is scheduled for serious neurosurgery on the same day.

He survives the day ... but his his wife is murdered, and, after confessing to an affair with her, Harry's archenemy, Casper Sidonis, accuses Harry of having killed her.

The most dimwitted cop in recent fiction arrives on the scene and agrees with Sidonis. From this somewhat far-fetched beginning, Dr. Corbett begins to unravel the mystery of his wife's murder, and uncovers a deep labyrinth of health insurance fraud and HMO conspiracies.

This book is particularly timely right now, with all the information about bribes and fraud on the part of HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry. I give it 5-stars.

When you've written as many novels as Michael Palmer has, it's a logical inevitability that something is the best and something else has to qualify as the weakest! It's a sad day to encounter that candidate for a career worst when you've come to believe that an author's quality is almost inevitably top flight!

When Evie Corbett, a young up-and-comer in the community, dies suddenly and unexpectedly on the eve of a surgery, homicide is suspected and the only suspect within view is her husband, Dr Harry Corbett.

At this point, I'm going to digress a little and take the liberty of quoting myself from my recent review of another Michael Palmer novel, "Critical Judgment":

"Uh oh ... I rolled my eyes and sighed, thinking I was wading into that aging medical thriller chestnut of the heroic sole practitioner waging battle against some evil megalomaniacal corporate demon. When Robin Cook first wrote "Coma" in 1977 almost single-handedly creating the medical thriller genre, this might have been new and exciting fare. But, since then, it's been beaten to death and I was convinced that "Critical Judgment" was bound to be a derivative dud."

Well, I went on to admit that "Critical Judgment" successfully beat back that initial negative impression and succeeded in spades.

But, "Silent Treatment" is another story. This time around, my eyes rolled back and just kept right on going. The plot (which IS of the derivative sole practitioner versus corporate megalomaniacal demon variety) and the criminals (a secret cabal of top level insurance executives seeking to eliminate high cost patients sucking profit off their bottom lines) are all fully revealed within the first few chapters by Palmer himself. The characters are wooden and any suspense that the plot may have generated was eliminated by its early revelation and complete lack of credibility. The major villain of the piece is a completely over-the-top, laughable, cartoonish parody ... a caricatured Dr Mengele, most recently an expert in non-invasive medical torture by the Colombian drug cartel. Now the insurance cartel have hired him as a nomadic serial killer, meandering from hospital to hospital, HMO to HMO, killing off expensive patients that the insurance companies have, with most grievous hindsight, realized they should never have given coverage.

And, before any zealous commenters yell at me, this is NOT a spoiler. Palmer managed that all by himself!

"Silent Treatment" was published in 1995. It was neither Palmer's first effort nor his most recent so I choose to treat it as an aberration as opposed to any indication that he's jumped the shark or lost his edge. I'll continue to read all of Palmer's novels as a solid fan but I can't recommend that any reader, fan or otherwise, bother with this particular novel.

Paul Weiss

This is a very good book. It is very hard not to turn the page once you get in to the book. This book is an allnighter, so be warned: if you plan on reading some of this book late you might want to drink some Jolt because you will not want to stop reading!! This is my favorite book because it keeps your interest and it has a good plot and suspense. When the book is over you want more. The ending is the only thing that could have been better in this book. It ends too fast!!! Michael Palmer has written some other good books but this is the best!!! I hope he or some other writer writes another book like this because these are the best kind of books!!!

I was on the edge while reading Silent Treatment!I recomend Silent Treatment to anyone who wants to go on a adventure into another reality.Michael Palmer brings you into the story with his detail,Your heart pounds as he reveals more of the plot/adventure-The characters are so realistic you soon realize you are becoming fond of them or hating them.If you truly want to go on the adventure yourself, I STRONGLY!!! suggest Silent Treatment.

Aaaaarrggh! How aggravating! I really felt it for Harry (the protagonist), really identified with his "I-didn't-do-it" plight, and I really felt his desperation for justification! The intrigue was good, the chases were great, and the villains were malignantly phenomenal ... but for heaven's sake where's the rest of the book! Dr. Palmer, DUDE, you don't just kill the bad guy and then hang up your scrubs for the day!!! You have to break it to the family (i.e. your lawyal readers), and take the time to do some cleaning up! After all that excitement, after all that preparation for such a risky vengeance, after all that build-up for giving it to the bad guys ... you just stopped! (My girlfriend would probably kill me if I tried something like that, if you know what I mean!). Sigh, but overall, it was quite a thrill ride, comparable indeed to the heart-stopping adrenaline trauma left behind by such other renounders as Cook and Grisham. And I appreciate the (incomplete) 430 pages that I got! So the book gets four stars. But can I get one star worth of my money back please?

This is the first book I've read by Dr. Michael Palmer and I am very impressed. The characters seemed very real and complex. I especially liked the fact that Harry Corbett was both compassionate and complex. "The Doctor" scared me to death! The plot was fascinating and the writing was top notch. It was a real page turner. I can't wait to read the next book by Palmer. I highly recommend this book.