The Taxol Thief
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
For three decades, the FDA denied approval of a first-in-class drug, "taxol," condemning thousands of breast-cancer victims to certain death. The Taxol Thief is the story of one couple's attempt to evade that fate by smuggling taxol from China through Russia.
Anastasia and Troy Locke had a bright future. She had just landed a college teaching position. He was a McDonald's manager with plans for a restaurant of his own, when their world caved in. His wife's diagnosis: Cancer.
His dad offered his knowledge. "Taxol, perhaps?"
Extracted from the yew tree, Julius Caesar's armies forged deadly arrows from taxol wood. Cantabrians committed suicide by chewing its poisonous seeds, rather than submit to Ceasar's slavery. But the fleshy red seed casings, the aril, were delicious, life-giving delicacies. Taxol effectively treated breast cancer in sixty percent of clinical trials.
What's the problem? Taxol might be the cure, if you can get your hands on it ... So begins Troy Locke's odyssey, a frustrating, danger-fraught journey to obtain a medical hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barclay uneven first thriller novel, set mainly in the early 1990s, draws on his experience as the president of international marketing for a pharmaceutical company that produced the chemotherapy medication Taxol. The narrator, who manages a McDonald's in Winter Park, Fla., describes himself as "your humble scribe, who having been christened twenty-two years ago Igor Vladimirovich Fetisov, was adopted at seven and rechristened Troy V. Locke." Troy's prolixity is a regular feature of a plot line that centers on his desperate search for a treatment for his beloved wife, Anastasia, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. To add to the melodrama, Troy learns that Anastasia is pregnant. Hope for a cure rests with Taxol, but as the FDA has not yet approved the medicine for sale in the U.S., he must go to extreme lengths to smuggle some into the country. Digressions, such as Troy's efforts to introduce Mexican fast food to Russia and his ruminations on extraterrestrial life, somewhat undercut the tension about Anastasia's fate. This review has been corrected; a previous version incorrectly listed the author's name.
