Nano

October 29, 2012
This accomplished if familiar medical thriller from bestseller Cook picks up the story of doctor-to-be Pia Grazdani after her horrific experiences in 2011’s Death Benefit, which included being abducted and witnessing a colleague, Will McKinley, being shot in the head. Pia decides to defer her New York City residency in favor of taking a position with Nano, a Boulder, Colo., company on the cutting edge of nanotechnology research. Nano’s development of “a microbivore-based antibacterial treatment” may help Will recover. To no reader’s surprise, Nano’s stereotypical evil businessman/scientist head, Zachary Berman, is prepared to jump across experimental ethics lines in pursuit of his own ends. Though Berman’s company finds a way to enable “a man to survive a massive, normally lethal medical crisis apparently unharmed,” Pia suspects that something more sinister is in the works. The concept of a young medico stumbling on a deadly conspiracy may have been fresh in 1977’s Coma, but more than three decades later, there isn’t much novelty left.