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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coma comes a chilling novel that asks: What happens when innocent hospital patients are used as medial “incubators” against their will?
“Brutally intense . . . a medical thriller cannot get any better than Host.”—Associated Press
Lynn Peirce, a fourth-year medical student at South Carolina’s Mason-Dixon University, thinks she has her life figured out. But when her otherwise healthy boyfriend, Carl, enters the hospital for routine surgery, her neatly ordered life is thrown into total chaos. Carl fails to return to consciousness after the procedure, and an MRI confirms brain death.
Devastated by Carl’s condition, Lynn searches for answers. Convinced there’s more to the story than what the authorities are willing to reveal, Lynn uses all her resources at Mason-Dixon—including her initially reluctant lab partner, Michael Pender—to hunt down evidence of medical error or malpractice.
What she uncovers, however, is far more disturbing. Hospitals associated with Middleton Healthcare, including the Mason-Dixon Medical Center, have unnervingly high rates of unexplained anesthetic complications and patients contracting serious and terminal illness in the wake of routine hospital admissions.
When Lynn and Michael begin to receive death threats, they know they’re onto something bigger than either of them anticipated. They soon enter a desperate race against time for answers before shadowy forces behind Middleton Healthcare can put a stop to their efforts once and for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Cook's engrossing medical thriller revisits themes from 1977's Coma. Lynn Peirce, a fourth-year medical student at the Mason-Dixon University Medical Center in Charleston, S.C., has her life upended when her lawyer boyfriend, Carl Vandermeer, suffers severe brain damage during a routine orthopedic procedure. Baffled by what went wrong, Lynn and a colleague, Michael Pender, turn detective to find answers. But they only come up with additional questions when they learn that Carl wasn't the only patient at the hospital to suffer such complications, and they discover more about a state-of-the-art high-tech facility affiliated with Mason-Dixon that houses patients in vegetative states. A prologue alerts the reader to the existence of a conspiracy through the journal entries of another victim of bad medicine, Kate Hurley, who ends up murdered during a "horrific home invasion." Cook does a good job of making the medicine intelligible, though the ending may strike some as stretching credulity a bit too far.
