Medical Books

Scarpetta (Kay Scarpetta)

Patricia Cornwell

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Editorial Review:

From America’s #1 bestselling crime writers comes the extraordinary new Kay Scarpetta novel.

Leaving behind her private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured man on Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric prison ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and when she literally has her gloved hands on him, he begins to talk—and the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard.

The injuries, he says, were sustained in the course of a murder . . . that he did not commit. Is Bane a criminally insane stalker who has fixed on Scarpetta? Or is his paranoid tale true, and it is he who is being spied on, followed and stalked by the actual killer? The one thing Scarpetta knows for certain is that a woman has been tortured and murdered—and more violent deaths will follow. Gradually, an inexplicable and horrifying truth emerges: Whoever is committing the crimes knows where his prey is at all times. Is it a person, a government? And what is the connection between the victims?

In the days that follow, Scarpetta; her forensic psychologist husband, Benton Wesley; and her niece, Lucy, who has recently formed her own forensic computer investigation firm in New York, will undertake a harrowing chase through cyberspace and the all-too-real streets of the city—an odyssey that will take them at once to places they never knew, and much, much too close to home.

Throughout, Cornwell delivers shocking twists and turns, and the kind of cutting-edge technology that only she can provide. Once again, she proves her exceptional ability to entertain and enthrall.

The Keepsake: A Novel

Tess Gerritsen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen knows how to expertly dissect a brilliantly suspenseful story, all the while keeping fascinated readers riveted to her side. By turns darkly enthralling and relentlessly surprising, The Keepsake showcases an author at the peak of her storytelling powers.

For untold years, the perfectly preserved mummy had lain forgotten in the dusty basement of Boston’s Crispin Museum. Now its sudden rediscovery by museum staff is both a major coup and an attention-grabbing mystery. Dubbed “Madam X,” the mummy–to all appearances, an ancient Egyptian artifact–seems a ghoulish godsend for the financially struggling institution. But medical examiner Maura Isles soon discovers a macabre message hidden within the corpse–horrifying proof that this “centuries-old” relic is instead a modern-day murder victim.

To Maura and Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, the forensic evidence is unmistakable, its implications terrifying. And when the grisly remains of yet another woman are found in the hidden recesses of the museum, it becomes chillingly clear that a maniac is at large–and is now taunting them.
Archaeologist Josephine Pulcillo’s blood runs cold when the killer’s cryptic missives are discovered, and her darkest dread becomes real when the carefully preserved corpse of yet a third victim is left in her car like a gruesome offering–or perhaps a ghastly promise of what’s to come.

The twisted killer’s familiarity with post-mortem rituals suggests to Maura and Jane that he may have scientific expertise in common with Josephine. Only Josephine knows that her stalker shares a knowledge even more personally terrifying: details of a dark secret she had thought forever buried.

Now Maura must summon her own dusty knowledge of ancient death traditions to unravel his twisted endgame. And when Josephine vanishes, Maura and Jane have precious little time to derail the Archaeology Killer before he adds another chilling piece to his monstrous collection.

Book of the Dead

Patricia Daniels Cornwell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 648 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

This is the work of an awarding-winning author? 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I too have never submitted a review but after discovering how bad it is I felt I just had to add my impression of this piece of work.

I agree with many of the complaints express on this site by other readers. I find it very choppy to the point of being frustrating with a rambling, poorly defined storyline. Cornwell just drops readers into conversations and situations with no set up at all. It is actually disorienting ...like when you walk in the middle of a conversation or event in real life. She also has many characters with few being very well developed and seemed to be short on coming up with creatively differing names. I found several characters were given very similar names that contributed to confusion.

What amazed me most are the sentence fragments. When I learned grammar I believe that one of the rules was: sentences had to contain a subject and a verb. I don't know, have they changed that rule? Is it a `creative writing' thing?

I also find this book boring and long on conversations that really don't seem to go anywhere but to express over and over again the character's (and perhaps the author's too) political views of which I could not care less.

The bio in the back of the book lists a number of awards the author has won, pointing out some very distinguished British awards never won by any other American author. If this is what they consider work worthy of such awards, then I question the awards.

Editorial Review:

From America's #1 bestselling crime writer comes the extraordinary new Dr. Kay Scarpetta novel.

The 5th Horseman (Women's Murder Club)

James Patterson, Maxine Paetro

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 193 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

so confused 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

yes, the book was great, very intense in part. But the last few chapters were so scattered I felt like i had to go back to see what I had somehow missed. And the whole car murders inbetween seemed lifeless. I never truly understood what that was all about. If someone figured out how the night watcher and the doctor were involved I would be happy to have them explain it to me. Otherwise it seems like night watcher followed him around killing people and then he took all the credit for the murders in a round about way to win the court case. weird.

Editorial Review:

It is a wild race against time as Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer and the newest member of the Women's Murder Club, attorney Yuki Castellano, lead an investigation into a string of mysterious patient deaths--and reveal a hospital administration determined to shield its reputation at all costs. And while the hospital wages an explosive court battle that grips the entire nation, the Women's Murder Club hunts for a merciless killer among its esteemed medical staff. The newest addition to the topselling new mystery series takes the Women's Murder Club to the most terrifying heights of suspense they have yet to encounter. THE 5TH HORSEMAN proves once again that James Patterson is "the page-turningest author in the game right now " (San Francisco Chronicle).

The House of God: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital

Samuel Shem

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 140 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Classic hospital satire 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I've read this book 2 1/2 times now. The first time I only got through half - I was a premed and being a liberal feminist I was offended by the treatment of women. The second time I read it all the way through - I was a first year med student and after ignoring the sexist stuff it was a very funny read - but not all of it was accessible to me with my limited medical knowledge at the time. The third read was recently as a 4th year student. Even more hilarious now that I've been through the experience of the wards. Highly recommended!

Editorial Review:

Now a classic! The hilarious  novel of the healing arts that reveals everything your  doctor never wanted you to know. Six eager interns  -- they saw themselves as modern saviors-to-be.  They came from the top of their medical school class  to the bottom of the hospital staff to serve a  year in the time-honored tradition, racing to answer  the flash of on-duty call lights and nubile  nurses. But only the Fat Man --the Clam, all-knowing  resident -- could sustain them in their struggle to  survive, to stay sane, to love-and even to be  doctors when their harrowing year was done.


From the Paperback edition.

A Case of Need

Jeffrey Hudson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 102 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Stimulating Story that kept my interest 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

A Case of Need is a stimulating story that kept my interest and I found that it was hard to put down. It educated s on some of the arguments for both sides of the abortion issue while maintaining a very good story line and character set. The plot revolves around who performed an illegal abortion on a girl from an affluent family.
As you read on you that the abortion killed the girl, so the person who performed the abortion is guilty of murder. For medical thriller fans I would highly recommend this book.

An unintentional but revealing "portrait of the author as a young man" 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Dr. John Berry is a pathologist who's been covering for a colleague's policy of occasionally providing abortions. The colleague, Dr. Arthur Lee, truly believes that failure to provide medical care - in the form of a safe hospital procedure - constitutes malpractice, morally speaking. He bases this belief on the number of women who, when refused such a procedure, end their pregnancies anyway by methods far more dangerous.

Now Art Lee is in jail, charged with an abortion that John Berry believes he didn't perform. The patient, daughter of a prominent Boston surgeon, died. According to her family, Karen Randall was a saintly young woman who's been foully murdered. According to Karen's friends and other associates, though, she was anything else but saintly. The same thing goes for her outraged father, and for most of the other people Dr. Berry winds up investigating as he desperately searches for the truth about Karen's death. Who actually did perform the abortion that killed her? That's the only information sure to free Dr. Lee before his case comes to trial, and a trial all by itself - even if it ends in acquittal - will kill his career, in this medical and social world of the late 1960s.

Michael Crichton's first novel, originally published under a pseudonym, is an amazing piece of work for so young a writer (he was 26). It's an intriguing detective story entwined with a stinging commentary on social hypocrisy and medical ethics, that 40 years later had the power to put me back in the world of my own adolescence. A world where unwed motherhood automatically branded the woman as at worst immoral, at best grossly immature; and where the laws of most U.S. states made termination of pregnancy in a hospital all but impossible, except when physicians like the fictional Art Lee and John Berry falsified the patient's diagnosis to provide a D&C for apparent "medical necessity."

Brrr. That world's memory scares me all by itself. The surprising thing about this book, though, isn't its "message" (it ought to be required reading for any woman who's grown up knowing she had control of her reproductive capacity from menarche onward). It's the look backward into the time and place that shaped this successful author, and then realizing - if you've read as many of his books as I have - how hard it was for him to let this world go, in creating the characters and plots for his later works.

Editorial Review:

Written by the author of "Jurassic Park", this medical thriller won the USA's Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel. Was it murder, or horribly botched surgery, or was someone in the great Boston medical centre violating the Hippocratic oath? One doctor is willing to seek out the truth.

Foreign Body

Robin Cook

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A series of unexplained deaths in foreign hospitals sends an idealistic UCLA medical student on a desperate search for answers, in this chilling tale from the master of the medical thriller.

Jennifer Hernandez is a fourth-year medical student at UCLA, just completing an elective in general surgery, whose world is shattered during a break in an otherwise ordinary day. While relaxing in the surgical lounge of L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, she half-listens to a piece on medical tourism, where first-world citizens travel to third-world countries for surgery. But when she hears her beloved grandmother’s name mentioned, her own heart nearly stops: the CNN reporter says Maria Suarez-Hernandez had died, a day after undergoing a hip replacement in New Delhi’s Queen Victoria Hospital.

Maria had raised Jennifer and her brothers from infancy, and their bond was unshakable. Still, the news that Maria had traveled to India was a shock to Jennifer, until she realized that it was the only viable option for the hardworking yet uninsured woman. Devastated, and desperate for answers, Jennifer takes emergency leave from school and heads to India, where relations with local officials go from sympathetic to sour as she presses for more information. With the discovery of other unexplained deaths followed by hasty cremations, Jennifer reaches out to her mentor, New York City medical examiner Dr. Laurie Montgomery, who has her own deep connection to Maria.

Laurie, along with her husband, Dr. Jack Stapleton, rushes to the younger woman’s side, discovering a sophisticated medical facility with little margin for error. As the death count grows, so do the questions, leading Laurie and Jennifer to unveil a sinister, multilayered conspiracy of global proportions.

Plum Island

Nelson DeMille

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 340 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

"The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong...It has to do with cutting the right deal." 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Detective John Corey, recovering from serious gunshot wounds, is staying at his uncle's home on Long Island's North Fork when he is asked by the local police chief to help out on a double murder investigation. The murdered couple, Tom and Judy Gordon, had been working at Plum Island, a super-secret government research facility, just off the coast, which had been investigating viruses that might be used in germ warfare. The theory that the couple might have stolen a particularly powerful virus to sell to a terrorist nation quickly leads to a competing theory that the couple might have been involved in selling drugs, and the local murder investigation soon crosses jurisdictional boundaries and draws county, state, and federal investigators.

Demille creates a rip-roaring narrative that fully involves the recovering detective in the investigation, even after he is officially fired. The Gordons had been members of the local historical society, which promotes legends about Captain Kidd, along with the theory that Kidd had hidden his treasure on Plum Island, perhaps near the island's unexplored archaeological ruins. It is only a short leap to yet another theory about the Gordons--that their deaths may be related to the Captain Kidd legend.

With two love stories, trips to a top secret laboratory, several more murders, a hidden cave, stories of pirate treasure, and even a hurricane, there are plot twists galore, and though the characters are not fully developed, they are interesting enough to keep the reader involved. Corey is not "Mr. Clean," but while his reliance on violence and his (somewhat dated) male chauvinism make him a somewhat cynical lead character, he is determined to find the Gordons' killers, and the reader roots for his success. Great escape reading. n Mary Whipple

The Lion's Game
Up Country
Night Fall
Wild Fire
The Gold Coast
The Gate House

Editorial Review:

Convalescing from a bullet wound on Long Island, NYPD homicide detective John Corey helps the local sheriff investigate a shooting. The victims are a married couple, both biologists on Plum Island, a top secret animal disease research site. When the media suggests that they stole a deadly virus, suddenly a local murder becomes a crime with worldwide implications in this masterwork of entrancing characters, a killer plot, and brilliant comic touches.

Cross Bones (Temperance Brennan Novels)

Kathy Reichs

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 113 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

BonesIII 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The author apparently does a lot of research for background facts. The main character is written with interesting dialogue.

If you can write in English, you might not enjoy this book 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The plot kept me turning the pages, but the writing is rather poor. The author uses a ridiculous quantity of sentence fragments for emphasis. The dialog sounds like a too-clever sitcom, where people speak to each other in wisecracks and cultural references rather than actual human language. Sometimes the author makes attempts at humor, for example, mentioning that Tempe's cat roots for a different sports team than she does. Who beyond the third grade finds that funny? I did enjoy the detailed descriptions of forensic procedures.

Editorial Review:

The key to a modern murder lies in the sands of history.

Examining a badly decomposed corpse is de rigueur for forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. But puzzling damage on the body of a shooting victim, an Orthodox Jewish man, suggests this is no ordinary Montreal murder. When a stranger slips Tempe a photograph of a skeleton unearthed at an archaeological site, Tempe uncovers chilling ties between the dead man and secrets long buried in the dust of Israel. Traveling there with Detective Andrew Ryan, Tempe plunges into an international mystery as old as Jesus, and centered on the controversial discovery of Christ's tomb. Has a mastermind lured her into an elaborate hoax? If not, Tempe may be on the brink of rewriting two thousand years of history -- if she can survive the foes dead set on burying her.

The Surgeon

Tess Gerritsen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 159 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Book, bad execution 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was very anxious getting my hands on this book after I had read all the reviews. The book started out very tense, and I liked the pace. However, towards the middle of the book I had this sneaking suspicion that the "killer" would be somebody the reader had never actually "met". It turned out to be a anonymous person who is always "hidden from the reader" until the very, very end. Unfortunately, that's what spoiled the book for me. I felt let down by the author who decided to drop the suspect right in front of me over the last 20-30 pages without any prior introduction.

Editorial Review:

Performed by Dennis Boutsikaris
Five CD's


Murdering women in the most obscene way imaginable, a sadistic killer terrorizes Boston. The hideous precision of his
methods suggests it is a deranged man of medicine, propelling the tabloid press to name him "The Surgeon." The cops' only clue rests with another surgeon, the victim of a similar brutal crime, who killed her attacker before he could complete his assault. Dr. Catherine Cordell is a professional who hides her new terror of intimacy behind a cool and elegant exterior. But Cordell's careful facade is about to crack-as the unknown killer cuts closer to the one woman with the skills to reveal his identity...


Filled with authentic detail that is the trademark of this doctor-turned-author, THE SURGEON is a thriller of unprecedented depth and suspence.