Mutant
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
Former ER doctor Peter Clement blends electrifying human drama with the suspense of top-notch medical thrillers. Now, in an all-too-plausible story that could have been torn from today's headlines, Clement has written his most gripping, utterly chilling novel to date.
On an isolated stretch of moonlit highway in Oahu, a woman cradles her dying son in her arms. Though a physician, she cannot staunch the flow of foamy blood from his body. In the days that follow, an autopsy draws a shocking conclusion: the boy, his lungs filled with blood, died of a disease previously found only in birds.
On the other side of the globe, a burned-out ER doctor repeats to himself over and over: Physician, heal thyself. For Dr. Richard Steele, a near fatal heart attack in the middle of his own hospital was the last warning he needed. Now Steele is being recruited into a movement to examine the hazards of genetically modified foods, a job that takes him to an explosive conference in Hawaii.
Spearheaded by a charismatic female doctor, the anti-bioengineering movement is gathering steam. While a powerful company is using genetic breakthroughs to create new, disease-resistant super crops, activists warn that new DNA strains will wreak havoc on the environment. But no one suspects that the controversy is masking a far more frightening human threat.
From the war-torn Middle East to an insulated laboratory in New York, from murder in a French cathedral to an act of terrifying violence at a remote Hawaii farm, a horrific plot is set in motion. With genetic researching opening new doors, one man has realized that altered strains of DNA cannot only change the make up of plant life--they can create the deadliest weapon of mass destruction ever unleashed upon the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the Machiavellian imagination of a physician/author of three paperback-original medical thrillers (The Procedure, etc.) comes this debut hardcover, mirroring today's headlines with its story of a world at the mercy of malevolent biogenetic engineers. Unfortunately, however, melodramatic, juvenile comic-book characterization, artless overwriting and distracting, tedious repetition curse the novel from page one. Following a particularly stressful day, veteran New York City ER physician Richard Steele a widower with a 15-year-old son suffers a near-fatal heart attack, totally oblivious that his karma is inexorably intertwined with a biogenetic accident that occurred 13 months before on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. At almost the same moment in nearby White Plains, Dr. Kathleen Sullivan a sort of postmodern Naderesque spokesperson for public radio's Environment Watch is delivering a prophecy of doom to media gathered at a press conference held by Agrenomics International, a mega-international corporation involved in genetic research. Three months later, Steele and Sullivan meet up at an environmental conference in Hawaii, where Sullivan makes a nocturnal foray to a chicken farm where she believes experiments in mutant viruses are being carried out, and is beset by armed gunmen. Meanwhile, Steele beds the mom of an infant victim of the mutant virus, then witnesses her suicide. Star-fated, Sullivan and Steele become allies and lovers. Clement's tale is technically astute, if plagued with unnecessary detail, but his emotionally na ve characters and pulpy crafting leave him drifting in the choppy wake of medical suspense queen Tess Gerritsen, much less that of Robin Cook.
