Manner of Death by Robin Cook

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on December 5, 2023

Many of the Robin Cook novels I’ve read have hinged on plots of doubtful plausibility. Manner of Death is the least plausible among them.

The novel is one of many featuring medical examiner Jack Stapleton and his wife, Laurie Montgomery, who is New York City’s chief medical examiner. Much of the story (and the most interesting part) involves a young resident named Ryan Sullivan who is doing a rotation in the morgue, observing and assisting with autopsies. Sullivan doesn’t like the smell and would rather be performing work for which he feels more suited.

Sullivan shies away from one of the autopsies because it involves a suicide. Sullivan’s father committed suicide and Sullivan tried to kill himself when he was young. He was adopted by a doctor who is now a big shot, which explains his rise from unfortunate circumstances to a medical residency.

Although he doesn’t like autopsies, Sullivan becomes intrigued by the forensic evidence that drives decisions to classify deaths as suicides or murders staged as suicides. Montgomery makes him aware of several recent cases in which medical legal investigators alerted the medical examiners to red flags that might be indicative of homicide. All of the cases were eventually ruled to be suicides, in part because the police pressure the investigators to classify the death as a suicide because homicides are a lot of extra work.

Sullivan persuades Montgomery to excuse him from autopsies for a bit while he searches for commonalities in the cases. Sullivan interviews various investigators and witnesses to search for a common thread. He finds several. All of the victims were executives in large corporations, were reasonably young, and had recently had medical examinations that were paid for by their employers.

Without revealing any surprises, I think I can safely reveal that two related medical centers are scamming patients. One center makes a doubtful diagnosis and then sends the patient to the other center for unnecessary but expensive full body scans. The owner of the centers is losing money and doesn’t want to give refunds to disgruntled patients.

As is common to Stapleton novels, one of the central characters is imperiled as the novel nears its conclusion. That gives the novel its obligatory action, but it also means that the books in the series are acquiring a predicable sameness.

My complaint about the plot centers on the motive for the staged suicides. Hiring mercenaries from a security firm to commit murders seems like it would be more expensive (and much riskier) than simply settling claims of patients who decide they have been defrauded. And since the patients' employers are paying the bill, I doubt they would actually kick up much of a fuss.

A complaint that is common to all of Cook’s novels concerns the dialog. It’s awful. Maybe medical examiners in the real world speak to each other as if they were automatons (although AI speaks as naturally as humans these days). Attempts to make the characters sound human come across as artificial. And all characters, including non-doctors, speak in the same tedious voice. A doctor might say “irrespective of its efficacy” but would a cop?

Sullivan’s quest is reasonably interesting. He is a tedious young man but he’s still the novel’s saving grace. Given the leaden dialog and doubtful plot, I can’t give a full recommendation to Manner of Death, but hardcore fans of medical thrillers and of the forensic analysis surrounding death might enjoy it more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Night Shift by Robin Cook

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on December 6, 2022

Not many writers have the requisite knowledge base to produce medical thrillers. Robin Cook might owe part of his popularity to his ability to write credible thrillers set within the environs of the medical industry. He’s prolific, but perhaps a bit too prolific, as his work often seems unpolished. Perhaps his books don’t seem that way to him. While I’ve enjoyed some of Cook’s plots, Night Shift is predictable and only modestly suspenseful.

Jack Stapleton is a medical examiner in New York City. He works for his wife, Laurie Montgomery. Jack and/or his wife have been the central characters in about a dozen of Cook’s novels. Jack spends most of the novel feeling abused because the rest of the world will not defer to his superior knowledge, although he does make an effort to preserve domestic peace by attempting to compromise with his wife about his anti-vax mother-in-law and the proper response to his daughter’s autism. At least Cook makes an effort at characterization, even if he didn’t (in Jack, at least) create a likeable protagonist.

Dr. Susan Passero is a good friend of Laurie and tangentially of Jack. She dies in her car in a hospital parking garage, presumably from a heart attack. Jack performs the autopsy but can’t identify an apparent cause of death. He feels pressure to prepare a death certificate and release the body because Susan’s husband wants to adhere to a Muslim tradition of prompt burial. Her husband also wants the death certificate so he can make a prompt life insurance claim. Jack knows the husband but didn’t know he is a Muslim and is suspicious of his insistence that a death certificate be issued quickly.

Jack violates medical examiner rules that his wife is supposed to enforce by interviewing witnesses to conduct a death investigation. He cheeses off a hospital administrator by snooping in Susan’s office and talking to support staff. He learns that Susan also cheesed off people in the hospital by seeking a position on the committee that reviews patient deaths, which Susan seemed to think had been increasing for reasons that were unrelated to the pandemic.

Jack’s investigation leads to the death of one of the people he interviewed and eventually leads to a couple of attempts to murder Jack. Two scenes involving Jack’s attempted murders create the novel’s most suspenseful moments, although the suspense is limited. After all, if you don’t count James Bond (movie version) or Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle version), it’s not often that series protagonists die. Even more rarely do they stay dead.

Cook’s explanation of the medical jargon and difficulty of establishing a cause of death is credible and interesting. I enjoyed his insightful portrayal of hospitals as profit centers administered by businesses that have more interest in the bottom line than patient care.

The reader learns the killer’s identity while a third of the book remains, which takes some steam out of the story. My primary gripe is that Cook’s writing style makes the novel come across as a first draft. Cook is in love with needless adverbs. His characters engage in robotic dialog intended to educate the reader, not to create the illusion of two real people having an actual conversation. A couple of characters say that things need to be done “pronto,” just one example of dialog that doesn’t ring true. Police officers take time in the middle of a gunfight to get Laurie up to speed about why they’re shooting. A couple of careful rewrites might have made Night Shift a better novel, but not without adding some twists and thrills to enliven the rather conventional plot.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS