Vector Robin Cook

I have a strong medical curiosity; in particular, I'm fascinated by human anatomy. I'm a big fan of Dr Michael Baden of HBO's AUTOPSY series, and I've attended two of the cadaver sessions offered annually at the University of Puget Sound (something of a gross anatomy seminar for nursing students and EMT trainees). Also, epidemiology is one of my hobbies. So I looked forward to reading VECTOR, which I found on the bargain rack at Couth Buzzard. (A vector is the medium by which a contagious disease is spread.) The story involves a disillusioned Russian immigrant living in Brooklyn and driving a cab, who used to work in a covert bioweapons lab in the Ukraine; he teams up with some white supremicists, in a plot to release anthrax in Manhattan's Javits Center. This was written in 1999, before the 2001 anthrax scare, but three years after Tom Clancy's EXECUTIVE ORDERS, which offered a biowarfare scenario of aerosolized Ebola unleashed in the United States.

On the whole, not a terrible read, but very disappointing. Not a whole lot of medical detail, which I'd expected, since Robin Cook is himself a doctor (as opposed to Clancy, who packed a lot of medical information into EXECUTIVE ORDERS, though he's a goddamn investment broker from Merrill Lynch). The characters are facile, and the story is just this side of oh-you-gotta-be-kidding-me hokey. Michael Crichton (who directed the film version of Cook's novel COMA back in the 70's--a tight little thriller, actually) is maybe higher up on the implausible scale, but his books read faster and are a lot more informative; whereas his novels read like Hollywood script drafts, Cook reads like a USA Network movie of the week. I didn't think much of Patricia Cornwell, a few years ago when I read her first Kay Scarpetta novel, POST MORTEM, but she's better than this.