Seizure

Rating:
Summary: What happened to Robin Cook's writing?
Review: Granted, Robin Cook isn't high-brow literature, but until I read Seizure I enjoyed his writing for what it was: quick-read medical thrillers full of sometimes over-the-top plots and sometimes unbelivable characters but still readable and entertaining.
What happened with Seizure? Reading this one I sometimes got the feeling that the entire book was a joke because the plot and dialogue is absolutely laughable in some places.
But what I really hated about Seizure was the long, drawn-out and completely unneccesary details that make up about 1/3 of the entire book. A character goes to take a shower and we get to read two pages about their choice of shampoo and soap and a long paragraph about how cold the water was. None of which was at all important to the plot. Very irritating.
I gave this one 1 star only because I couldn't give it zero. A very disappointing effort from a writer who has shown the ability to be much better than this.

Rating:
Summary: I could not finish this book
Review: Having picked up this book and started with great expectations after his recent book Shock, I made a big fool of myself by believing that something exciting will throw up soon. But even after crossing 300 pages I could not make out what was going on and ran out of patience. This book reads more like an account of some tourists than a medical thriller. No more Robin Cook books please.

Rating:
Summary: Skip this one - did Robin Cook even write it?
Review: Hiss-boo! This one is the worst Cook ever.

There are NO likeable characters = no one to care about, they all stink. Everyone is just plain stupid too - they make one mistake after another, few of them plausable.

The whole shroud of Turin plot angle is just plain BOGUS! I guess the author wanted to write off a trip to Europe/Turin as "research" since this adds nothing to the book.

There are lots of problems with this book, please skip it and find something better to read.

Rating:
Summary: Something is missing
Review: I almost put this down just past the halfway mark because it was becoming boring and routine, but then things finally perked up. The most irritating thing about this book was the repetition of a phrase by almost every character. The plot was fascinating, but there were too many instances of botched actions by the characters to where I kept thinking where do we go from here. Unfortunately this is not as good as some of his earlier novels but I keep reading his books as they come out, hoping they will get better again. This wasn't the page turner I that I was hoping for.

Rating:
Summary: Agree with the others
Review: I am a dedicated Robin Cook fan. However this novel was awful. I kept waiting for something exciting to happen. The ending is contrived and we never get to hear any more about the characters. I will continue to read his books, but this one was really bad...

Rating:
Summary: Started out good but ended abruptly
Review: I enjoyed most of this book and it was much like other Cook novels but was very dissapointed by the ending. It just stops.

Rating:
Summary: No Longer Up To Par
Review: I have always enjoyed Robin Cook's medical thrillers in the past. Now Robin seems to have become too political in his writings, and he forgot to add the thrill. If I want to read someone's political stand, I will just look at my newspaper. Since I do not agree with his stand, I will no longer read his books.

Rating:
Summary: unbelievable plot
Review: I have been a fan of Robin Cook and waiting since last Oct for this book to come out. The plot is not believable. Cook mixes a mob link plus the Shroud of Turin to yield a plot that just never gets off the ground. We wait through the entire book for the results of the operation which should be the focus of the book. The operation occurs and the book ends almost immediately. It just does not work.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly written, want-a-be thriller...
Review: I have not read Robin Cook in a long time, and this book reminded me why. Cook hunts around for the newest medical/ethical problems and then uses it for fodder for his books. I remember reading and then seeing his very first medical thriller which came out when I was at college. It was about the possibility of using people who were purposely put into a coma, in order to use their organs for harvesting and transplantation. It was one of my first introductions to medical ethics, or the lack of such ethics.

Unfortunately, in the past 27 years, medical ethics has gotten worse, not better. Though they manage to stave off in this country the possibility of using people for organ donors against their wish or against the wishes of their families, in other developing countries, this is not an ethical problem. They go ahead and do whatever they want ethically.

This book brings up something I a currently working on. The use of women to get pregnant only to have the fetus aborted at 20 weeks in order to use the fetus for stem cell lines, and in this case, a possibility I had not thought of, the very unethical killing of female fetuses for getting to their ovaries which have cells very much desired for use. Oh goody, Cook just gave unethical medical personnel another idea. I agree it was probably out there anyway, but Cook probably provide the ones who were too dumb to think of this with the information they would like to have. All of this is done for money, in countries where they do not have the FDA or peer review, and other such things to keep medicine and science honorable. Not only do such groups prey on those scared of degenerative disease, but they also prey on the poor women of developing countries who are desperate for money.

This book did not have a single person who was ethical in it. Not even the Catholics who were approached concerning the Shroud of Turin, did things ethically. They wanted protection from legal mandates concerning lawsuits against them for allowing abuse by priests. Whether this type of bargaining goes on in political circles by religious groups in reality, I don't know. Probably, from what I've seen in my bioethics and disabilities groups.

A book without a character who can be considered 'good' makes for poor reading, fiction or not. I forgot how sloppy Cook writes. At the end of this book, none of the various subplots were solved. Everything is just left standing. Even if Congress and political powers tried to do a cover-up of medical abuse in other countries by a member of Congress, it would almost certainly be looked at by the press. A senator dies after jumping from a hotel room 38 stories up, and he is nude except for black socks, and a researcher he had been lambasting in Congress dies with him? No newspaper is going to ignore that.

In fiction, plots don't work unless there is some suspension of reality and the reader allows himself to be talked into the plot by the author. This does not happen in Cooks' books. Like other reviewers, I had a horrible time finishing this book. It was boringly written, and the only reason I finished it was because I was interested in this area of medical ethics to begin with, and wanted to see how far and how bad the situation was. If Cook is going to hand out ideas to the many medical businesses out there in the world, I want some type of forewarning.

Don't think I will pick up another one of Cook's books again. Waste of my time. Waste of anybody's time...

Karen Sadler

Rating:
Summary: Life is too short to waste on bad books
Review: I have read most of Cook's books, and this is the worst. After I read over 100 uninteresting pages, I checked the reviews here and found many similar negative opinions; so I quit reading it. I think it's time to dust off your stethoscope Robin.

Thanks for the online reviews folks, Amazon.com