Harsimran Kaur ON Jan 28, 2024, IN BOOK REVIEW, Manner of Death by Robin Cook– Fiction
Rating: 4/5
Death confronts in the most heroic way thereby creating enmity with life forever. How can we look back to see what happened that made us bleak and bleary; we are now in a refuge of sorts under the clandestinely lit operation, wearing the white Spartan robe to be buried under the thrashed rocky powder, alone and lamenting.
Not always the unpardonable truth will suffice a satisfying look, and imperceptibly in the stroke of death we may find ourselves on an autopsy table griming our own juice. Wish we would have been the bone shaker to give in to the extremities rather than being violated by our own body system? Not always though! The ‘Manner of Death’ squawks here, gaining prominence to either walk obsequiously to the funeral pyre or become the bolt to be hammered before fixed in the hole of nullity.
Robin Cook in his latest medical thriller ‘Manner of Death’ has assiduously juxtaposed staged suicide/homicide and the self-inflicted death. It makes you wonder how horrible and devastating death can be sometimes. In the end, we all maybe just the paraphernalia for callous vivisection tormented by human ontology of discretion.
Lauri Montomogery, the New York’s Chief Medical Examiner, has a tough job at hand. The certitude of letting her husband, Jack Stapleton, the highly experienced Medical Examiner to work for extended hours after his deplorable car accident is still cack-handed. On top of it, it’s the frowsty dealing with an ill-disposed Ryan Sullivan, the NYU Anatomical Pathology Resident who breaks no bones to despise the grotty smell of dead bodies, and is in fact a gnomic recalcitrant.
Of course, Laurie does not like to skid feet or whirl in circles. She makes Ryan worm his way out of his eccentricities to finally perform an autopsy on a gunshot suicide case. On the other side of the city, a diagnostic firm is getting its patients killed who are hammering the brick too hard. Taking the help of ‘Action Security’, the firm is inconspicuously taming a homicide to look like a suicide.
Is there something to fish out?
- Whats the incorrigible happening for the patients to be in a deep discord with the firm ultimately resulting in the loss of their life?
- Are we looking at a ‘breach of trust’ that imperceptibly rubs off the patient and puts diagnostic firms as a money squeezer?
- Is there really someone who will open the real can of worms to reaffirm the obnoxity of the crimes?
Thus, starts the imponderable right across the autopsy table when few bodies have a similar story to tell. The MLIs and the MEs become the spirit de corps to be the erudite espousal of the evidence collected & analyzed. The et seq. is the execrable exhuming of the ‘manner of death’ that finally becomes the cul de sac!
A strangulated body! Or are they looking at the eagle-eyed pathological evidences in play elucidating the slanging match of carotid arteries and the vertebral arteries? Suicide by gunshot! What about the placement of the barrel and the soi-disant temporal vs. oral gunshots? Robin Cook’s ‘Manner of Death’ is challenging and full of twist and turns. An aficionado in writing medical thrillers, this book further looks at how Medical Examiners work, and thereby reveals the bitter truth behind scuzzy minds that inflict patients with an unworthiness difficult to deal with for their own personal prolificacies.
In all these veracities, is caught the CMO Laurie Montgomery who becomes the final straw to be bent by the adversary. Keeping her professional commitments behind, she is on a run to catch the miscreant which may bring her own life under jeopardy.
TAKE AWAY
Incredible suspense and thoroughly gripping!