Genesis

October 28, 2019
The sleuthing overshadows the mystery in bestseller Cook’s routine 11th medical thriller featuring Laurie Montgomery (after 2018’s Pandemic). Montgomery, New York City’s chief medical examiner, has her usual full plate at work and at home: her office is under fire for a screwup involving cadavers with identical names; and her nine-year-old son is having trouble at school. In addition, a brilliant but difficult pathology resident, Aria Nichols, has been blowing off her residency. A sensitive case gives Montgomery the opportunity to work with Nichols. Social worker Kera Jacobsen has apparently died of an opioid overdose, and Jacobsen’s boss at the city’s Department of Pathology is hoping the autopsy can be handled discreetly. The discovery that Jacobsen was pregnant leads Nichols to pursue the father’s identity, using unconventional genetic testing to do so. By opening with a depiction of a married man drugging Jacobsen, Cook eliminates any doubt of foul play, and fans will regret Montgomery’s taking a back seat to Nichols for much of the book. Innovative forensic science isn’t enough to sustain interest. Agent: Erica Silverman, Trident Media Group.

November 15, 2019
Cutting-edge DNA database techniques are put to work by a foulmouthed troublemaker in the office of New York City's chief medical examiner. Medical thriller pioneer Cook (Pandemic, 2018, etc.) kicked off his Laurie Montgomery/Jack Stapleton series in 1992 with Blindsight. By now--the current book is the 12th in the series--the two autopsy mavens are married and she is New York's chief medical examiner. They are raising one kid with autism, another with potential ADHD, and Laurie herself may have to have a double mastectomy. But forget all that, because nobody is reading these books for the character development ("It was hopelessly clear to her that she would most likely never get over her aversion to speaking in front of groups, just like she was likely never to get over her fear of authority figures thanks to her emotionally distant and domineering father") or for the writing ("She could see that sun had cleared the horizon, again bathing that water tower on the neighboring building in golden light. To Laurie it seemed symbolic of having come to a decision"). See, he writes just like a real doctor. On the other hand, the plot is gangbusters. The death of a 10-weeks-pregnant social worker looks like an opioid overdose, but since the woman was not a drug user and there's no daddy on the scene, something seems a little off. Particularly to the brilliant, misanthropic, sociopathically rude and self-important Dr. Aria Nichols, who's been sent over from NYU for her pathology residency. The minute she sees the fetus in the uterus they're dissecting she has an insight. "This wasn't a sperm donor pregnancy. Some bastard had his way with this woman and then abandons her. I can just feel it. Hell, he might have even supplied the drugs or been the reason she decided to take them." The technique she employs to track down that sperm donor is similar to that used in the real-life Golden State Killer case and even more like the method memoirist Dani Shapiro used to find her real father, as described in Inheritance. Cook's spot in the pantheon of page-turning, bestselling thriller authors who write like Siri is secure.

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July 1, 2019

First, a pregnant young social worker ends up on Chief New York City Medical Examiner Laurie Montgomery's autopsy table. Then, when Montgomery asks Dr. Tricia Albanese, a forensic pathology resident with training in genetic science, to help track the unborn baby's father, Albanese ends up dead, too. Now the chief medical examiner has two clearly linked murders to solve. Wouldn't you know that the man who has helped define the medical thriller would home in on more cutting-edge science--genealogical DNA database tracking--for his next book?

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